So we've just had a team meeting.  It's been a little while so it was nice to get caught up on the latest happenings. Christos is handling the team lead role this time around and so far things look pretty good.  we're going to be implementing the sounds manager.  I'm unsure as to what this is supposed to look like exactly.  Christos seems to have a pretty good design in mind based on his previous experience. I hope that we can figure out who is doing what when the time comes.  I'm hoping to be one of the testers here. Maybe I can get a little bit more debugging experience in and help the group out that way. 

I would vollunteer straight away for the implementation as I feel it's my turn for this, but I don't have a lot of experience handling sound with XNA and others in our group have some better first hand experience. I'm willing to contribute however I'm needed.

Christos has posted some good reading material on the topic and I'll look through some of it tonight.

so we're getting close to the implementation dead line here and I think now is a good time for a blog post.  Everything, while not complete, is looking pretty good.  I don't feel as though we're really in crunch time here. There isn't an insurmountable amount of work left to be done.

As far as our work for team A, they seem pretty satisfied. We're doing some final testing and have found a bug or two, but they look like they should be easy to iron out. The design is somewhat confusing in terms of the Alpha list on top of a numeric list, but this seems mostly to be a product of the requirements listed in the homework.


I've taken some good looks at team C's implementation of our design and we've had to make some changes along the way.  most of the changes have been handled by email and skype meetings and the group has been nothing but awesome in terms of complying with requests. I realize how hard it is to design something without being able to iterate through the project. I'm glad we were able to communicate with the implementing team and work out the kinks.

So We've finally finished the design phase of project 2 and I have to say I'm happy with the design.
We did have some good debate and so I think the design is stronger because of this. We really had to hash out why it needed to be a double linked list and how some of the functions should act. This was further reinforced when we conferenced with the end customer of our product (Keenan, during class). I've seen similar work before in other classes and so I'm considering myself the expert on this project. I'll be coordinating with Team C to make sure they stay on track and get the work done the way we want it. I'll also be coordinating with Team A on their project. I haven't heard from them yet and so i think I'll have to reach out to them tonight.

I mainly wanted to pot tonight because I just finished our initial meeting with Team C.  They seem like nice guys and I'm confident they'll get the work done.  We've agreed that I'll be checking perforce daily to see how they're doing and can expect something significant either late Friday (less likely) or Saturday evening (more likely)  We intend to get back together on Sunday for a code review and to attempt to poke some holes in the implementation in case they need to make repairs. They told me the documents look good and they are fairly certain they know what needs to be done.  I think our hard work on the docs we presented will have paid off.

Project 1 Finished

So I've just sent in my assessment of project 1 and everything looks to be done.  We had a couple of missteps here and there But in the end we got it done. I'm happy with the way things have turned out and I think future projects should go smoother now that we have a bit of a baseline for how things should go.  It's good to be done.

Last check in beofre the deadline

So I've just finished writing what I can of my unit tests. I do wish the programm picked to do a unit test had been screened a bit better. I suppose in the real world you don't get a choice like that so it is what it is. I chose to make all of my tests come out of the same class so that I could focus on one aspect of the program rather than having to learn about the project as a whole. This aproach had it's advantages and disadvantages.

One of the big advantages was that I felt pretty good command of the file I was looking at. I found out which functions had to work together and it was all written by one programmer so the style didn't change much throughout the file.

The biggest disadvantage was that I had almost no idea how the class I was focusing on was supposed to function as a part of the whole. Setting up my tests proved difficult as I didn't really know what functions to call to initialize properly or even which variables needed to be initialize.  I was even hazy on how far into the whole process my parts were being used.

A second disadvantage I had to work with was the fact that the code I chose to test wasn't complete. there were two classes at the bottom of the file that said something along the lines of "this isn't done, let's finish this later"  and three of the four functions I test make calls to this function. As aresult my tests fail off the bat and it's rather difficult to tell if the tests are effective or not. I did a little bit of commenting lines of code out while I was writing the test just to see if I could get some aspects to pass. certainl not ideal.


On an equally gloomy note I've checked in with the team and everyone is scrambling to get things submitted to perforce. I'm the only one with a check in thus far and it looks like I'm going to have to just trust everyone to get it handed in on time as I won't be able to nag everyone while I'm at work tomorrow. As a result I think i'll have to wait until after class tomorrow to hand in the assesments.  here's to hoping it all goes as planned.

Another "team" meeting just occurred. This time it was just Gabriel and I. I suppose over the last 3-4 days I've met with everyone at least once in some capacity which is a good thing. I saw on Christos' blog that he's been sick today, so I understand him missing out. It feels like the team is really falling behind here, but we still have some good time to get things finished up.  Christos seems to be about half done from what I can gather in his blog posts, maybe a little more.  Gabriel told me today he's been finished since Friday which is good news. All he has left to do is upload his tests to perforce.

Unfortunately, Dan's progress still eludes me.  I sent him a text after our meeting to see what happened and his reply was that he got called in to work today. A text or an email to let me know he wasn't going to make it would've been nice. I'm not so sure the phone call the other day got to him the way I had hoped. He's got other priorities and I understand that, but I don't think we ask much of him and it shouldn't be hard to let you're team know what's going on. I'd feel better about his absenteeism if I knew about it ahead of time.

All that being said I'm confident our project will be handed in on time. These tests are harder than they sound but not impossible. private methods are proving difficult, but the unit test wizard does help. I'll be checking in with the team again tomorrow and hopefully we're on track.

So I just took a look at our team page to be sure everyone is moving along and unfortunately there's no evidence of dan checking in since his work tuesday before class.  This in itself isn't such a big deal as the other teammates haven't had much action either except for Dan is a few days behind.  I want to give the guy the benefit of the doubt here but I think at this point he's given me no choice but to confront him. 

It's been three days since he posted the following on the wiki under our project 1 Assignments:

"Dan: Can't install the CCM.exe on school computers, will figure this out tonight."

He hasn't emailed the team for help. He hasn't posted anything on the forums. He doesn't mention it on his blog. In my opinion it's all just unacceptable at this point.  I hate to have to bitch at the guy, but I'm just not sure what else to do here. I'll give him a phone call tonight and see how it goes.

Had a little check in with Dan this evening.  I'm glad we finally got to touch base with a more instant exchange rather than some back and forth emails. It sounds like he's getting over the hump of being without a computer for some time here.  I've checked the wiki and his contact info is up there. I'm a little disappointed he wasn't able to get his decisions on which tests he'll be doing but we talked about it and I understand his predicament.  He's agreed to get in his decisions by class time tomorrow.  Here's to hoping he follows through.