Devcathlon difficulties

These last few days were supposed to involve designing and implementing a mock-up prototype for the proposed Devcathlon system's user interface. Unfortunately I had a lot of difficulty wrapping my head around the scope of the project, as well as organizing my schedule in order to get the needed hours in. While things seemed like they were off to a good start, my contribution to the current mock-up is very minimal. All of the files in the mockup1 directory were done by my other team members, Anthony Du and Daniel Arakaki.

Design meetings

Initially I felt that the team was off to a good start, though I was a bit confused in our initial direction. I couldn't seem to understand whether we needed to be creating our own implementation of rules, or following those initially discussed on our ICS 414 discussion. Nevertheless, our team met on Wednesday and Friday and went over a number of use cases and implemented several pages based on some sample html. The basic design we came up together and individually called for at least the following pages:

• Home page with login, registration, help, and public viewing links
• Registration page collecting user name, email information, privacy options
• A private personal profile page to manage settings, view associated projects and teams, and start new projects
• A public personal profile page where other users can view selected information
• A private project profile page where a project manager or "gamemaster" can add members, setup teams, set privacy settings, choose events to track and their point values, create custom events, award special points, and mark a match as complete
• A public (read only) project profile for public users to view information on a project
• A page to define customized events that aren't within the scope of the basic event tracking
• A scoreboard page with a listing of current and completed projects
• Links on the main scoreboard page would lead to project scoreboard page would list scores be broken down by teams
• Team links would list scores by individual members, which would link to the member profile pages
• Pages with information and links to help users get acquainted with Devcathlon

We got several of these pieces done as a group on Friday and broke apart some of the remaining tasks to be worked on, however I never managed to make any progress on creating a custom event page or working out a good system of help pages.

Points unawarded

To help get a feel for what Devcathlon is all about, we were supposed to track our development using Hackystat and simple notes. However this definitely didn't go as planned, at least for me. My recent computer reformat left me with a lot of trouble even getting Eclipse back to where it was to do any sort of tracking through that sensor. In the end I didn't do any commits personally, so a mountain of negative points there. As a team, we didn't define and use any issue tracking either. As a mock-up, there wasn't a whole lot to track as tests, coverage, builds, coupling, and complexity really weren't involved. We had a couple of team meetings, of which I have various notes, but not what I would really call minutes.

Conclusions

Devcathlon is off to a rather rocky start for me, mostly as a result of personal confusion and difficulties. Unfortunately my team also suffers as a result of this, for which I definitely feel bad for letting them down. Definitely hoping to figure things out soon and get things back on track. I know I've got lots of ideas for the project, safely written in my always-present notebook. I just need to work on getting them off of paper and into the public domain!