Informative Workspace Code Review

This week we had a chance to review the Informative Workspace's web application: project overviewer which is currently displayed in two of the moniotors in CSDL. It aims at providing a general overview of each of the 4 projects we are doing in ICS 414.

Downloading and setting the project up was very straight forward. At first, verify doesn't pass becuase I am using a different version of PMD and Checkstyle. The team mentioned already mentioned that they are using different versions of some of the QAs so this is not surprising. After modifying the build files to refer to the correct version instead, verify passed.

The team asked us to try and displayed our own project in the project overviewer. This turns out to be a pretty straight forward task too. All that is required is changing a couple line of PageInfoWork.java to provide my hackystat account information and the subversion url.

Possible improvement:
1. Includes a troubleshooting section. I encountered PermGem error very often at first, and I have to shut down and restart tomcat whenever that happen. At the end, I took away other .war or .jar file from the tomcat webapp folder and that stopped happening again. And also problem with deploying and undeploying the war file for multiple times in a session. These problems might be common with user and providing a section to guide user through them would be helpful.

2. A count-down clock would be more useful than just displaying the milestone date in a line.

3. Documentations on how to modify the code to display a particular project should be included. It may not be obvious to all users that all we had to do is to change a couple lines in the PageInfoWork.java to bring up their own projects.

4. Documentation for changing the PMD, checkystat version number in the build.xml should also be included. Otherwises, some users may think that they have to upgrated their QA tools in order to build the project.

5. Even though this is just for review purpose, it would be nice to include everything in all the projects instead of having to try import our own projects in the Info-Work page.

6. The tree takes up too much space and I don't think it is necessary to list out all the files. For example, for our project, the .cs files are of more interests to the users. Just looking at all the .cs files would provide a good-enough overview of our project.

All in all, the project overview had a good start and I look forwards to seeing the final product .