Day: January 14, 2016

We’re almost ready for QA testing now. We have the server all setup and have begun setting up instructions for future deployments to this and the future production server. The process is very similar to what we’ve done for deploying to our dev server it’s now just more organized and documented which is good. We’ve been having several meetings going over how QA will work which is basically how everything works now except we aren’t the ones testing the application. And again this week was mostly bug fixes and testing.

I’m almost halfway through my term which is crazy and I definitely feel a lot more confident with the whole project as well as with agile development. This was my first real experience working on a team and it was both very interesting and very exciting. In the past 4 months I got a lot of valuable experience in software development, planning, agile development, project management, working on a team, working on projects in parallel with others, as well as plenty individual skills like time management. It’s nice to look back on the past 16 weeks and realize how much the team and I have accomplished. As far as the work I did this week it was more of the same, testing, debugging, bug fixes.

I got back from my vacation on Tuesday. Not much actual project work was done while I was gone but there was a lot of design meetings and everything seems to be more on track now. The deadline was pushed back to September to enter QA testing. Most of my work this week was reviewing the design changes as well as doing more testing, debugging and bug fixes. There is only a view more stories that need to be completed for us to enter QA so everyone is more confident of the deadlines now. I was also doing a lot of work reviewing the BOL reconciliation concept and I feel that I really understand it a lot more now which is good.

VACATION

We spent a large part of this week in meetings planning out how we will proceed with the project. I also did a large amount of individual testing and bug fixes. I’m going on vacation next week so I’ll have to see when I get back if we can get into QA by end of August.

This week was very similar to the last with an emphasis on performance increases. There were several meetings dedicated to improving our performance or determining if we even can improve. I suggested using bulk insert for saving data to the database instead of our current method of batch inserts but we decided that we shouldn’t do this so we can more easily debugging problems with saving, and also to get more detailed logging. We’ve also recently been testing our application on our dev server.

Things have died down a bit now. Most of my work consisted of testing and debugging our application. Also because of our big application change there was some broken code. I spent a lot of my time fixing erroneous and buggy code, ass well as repairing some of the unit tests. We`re starting to realize that the application may take longer than 15 minutes so we`re trying to increase performance.

This week was crazy busy. I believe I worked around 60-70 hours, however I’m starting to get used to the long hours, time really seems to fly at work now. We ran into a big problem this week that really set us back. During our integration testing for the application we realized that we were saving duplicate data to the database which was causing exceptions to be thrown. At first I thought there was a bug in my database writer but after a couple hours of debugging I realized that the problem was actually because of how our stop based freight moved object was structured. This meant huge changes to our application. In the end we decided the simplest and most effective solution was to have the stop object be set up like a graph where each sub object relates back to its parent. This way if you were given any part of the stop you could “walk” across the entire freight move. We also added functionality to reuse objects when the data is the same instead of creating new ones. This way we could reuse references and only save an object once per freight move. This wasn’t the ideal solution but it allowed us to keep the object at a stop level so as to not break all the existing methods in the application. We had to rush this fix and begin testing again hence the long hours but I’m starting to enjoy the coding and free pizza.

Time is flying by and I can’t believe I’m already a quarter of the way  through my term. I was able to get more work done on the writer and run some tests and the results are good, I’ve now begun looking at ways to improve performance and have started testing. There was some integration testing starting near the end of the week which is promising. I do believe the deadline will be moved back to August for the application however. We’ve started to realize exactly how big this project is, as is everyone else in the company. We’ve been having more meetings trying to better design our application and try and be ready by August. I’ve also been staying late a lot more, this includes free pizza however so it’s not that big of a deal. On a side note Canada day was pretty fun, great way to break up the week.

I have made really good progress with the database writer. I have basically finished the data access layer for the raw freight move data, and have now begun planning out how I will save the analyzer data. Since we are storing data at a stop level, the current version of the writer is designed to call one save method and pass in the stop object, the writer will then call several individual and more specific writer for each inner object. I believe the writer for the analyzer and calculator data will work in a much similar way. We are approaching July now and there are growing concerns that we won’t make our deadline. We haven’t done much testing on our application (so far only unit testing not much in the way of integration), and we don’t know much about how much memory the application uses or if it can be completed in under the 15 minute timeline. We’re starting to have more meetings trying to figure all this out. I’ve begun staying late to help the team however there isn’t much believe that we can meet the deadline.