21.MyISERN-1.2

Link to our project page: http://code.google.com/p/myisern-1-red/
Project download: http://code.google.com/p/myisern-1-red/downloads/list

Tasks:
All tasks for this assignment are completed.

Difficulty:
There were several problems faced. Firstly, we were confused with how to implement the methods to edit current researcher, collaboration or organization. We come up with several possible implementation ideas and finally clarified with Dr. Johnson on what the users expects to do when editing information. However, the actual implementation was not as easy as we thought. We come into problems when we write these methods and checking the link is a particular one that gave us lots of troubles. We used httpunit to check and validate the links but it kept giving us various errors when we run the program. After spending a whole night on adding in more data checking and throwing in exceptions, this problem was finally solved. Secondly, there was the problem with displaying our data in the table. We used Swing to print out tables. It worked fine for printing the researchers and organization which has a relatively simpler structure than the collaboration data. However, when it came to the collaboration data, we have trouble with displaying some entries. For example, those with missing years cannot be displayed at all. Thirdly, when my groupmate Jared did the testing, he kept receiving error: “junit.framework.AssertionFailedError: Forked Java VM exited abnormally” which is probably due to the vast amount of data put into the heap. After trying other possible tests, in the end, he has to take out those tests as there was no way to get around the problem caused by limitation of memory available. Lastly, there is the problem with entering the data. I entered the collaboration data and it was quite tedious to figure out the collaboration data from the given pdf, there was a lot of missing data so a lot of guesses was put in to make it as complete as possible. However, this is not a big problem compared to coding and it gave a good taste of what it is in real life at work because the users won’t always give you every data or requirements you need and you have to be able to sort them out.

Group work:
This is a nice experience working with my groupmates Jared and Phuoc as we are all willing to help each other whenever needed. One problem we faced was the lack of overall coordination. We didn’t assign work explicitly to each member. We all just took up whatever work is not done at that moment and worked on it. If we faced problem as we worked on our tasks, we would bring it out and the other members would always be willing to help which is encouraging. However, we feel that it would be more efficient if we just break down the tasks and assign them to each member instead.

Improvement for next Milestones:
There is mainly two ways to improve the process and the project itself. Firstly, in terms of group work, we would improve the overall coordination by breaking down the tasks into smaller parts and assign them to each member instead of volunteering to take up whatever part is left undone. This should make this programming process more efficient. Secondly, we would consolidate the code. For example, we have separate methods for adding or editing researchers, collaborations, and organizations respectively. In these methods, there are all performing similar actions and these actions could possibly be simplified by grouping them as another method. Moreover, given this project has grown so much in size that we have thousands of codes now, there would absolutely be other places with reluctant codes. We would go through the code in details for our next milestone and sort these codes out.