Devcathlon has been a three month project intended to simulate a software engineering environment in hopes to improve development team practices, and to promote overall project health. In this entry, I'll evaluate the application through my personal perspective as a developer, along with the evaluations of outside testers. I'll also mention about my experiences in building this project, and the future of this application.
A programmer's perspective:
The journey through markup...
Most of my development time was spent on building the profile section of Devcathlon. It wasn't difficult, but there's still room for lots of improvement. I kept this first version of Devcathlon's profile page simple, in order to focus on the teams, matches and scoreboard pages. Devcathlon underwent through many physical and functional changes since its first conceptual designs. We started out with basic HTML mock-ups which looked and felt very web 2.0-ish; considering that it had some Javascript, some signs of pagination and an array of CSS layouts. By separating ourselves into three separate teams of three, we were able to generate some very inspirational designs and structures that would eventually be inherited into the "final" product. Although some design elements were put away as future enhancements, due to being labeled as aesthetic gains rather than functional gains, we did provide, in this version, an intuitive, yet simple user experience. The gains of taking this conservative approach would rather benefit ourselves in the long-run, since we built a strong foundation of our application and left plenty of room for advance UI's to take place later. Of course, we've only scratch the surface of Wicket's abilities to render some "pretty," and dynamic markup, but I'll see to it in our future implementation that we have an eye-candy application. At this point, I'm very pleased with what we have, as far as the look and feel goes. The application has a conformed look and layout; we made good use of our CSS to standardize our information in reusable "panels," and we also preserved colors and fonts similar to Hackystat's UI. I'm willing to put energy during this summer to make improvements in this area by incorporating more AJAX-y alternatives to necessary parts of the web application.
Functionality in design...
Below is a list of my likes and dislikes, and some possible way of improving each portion of the web application. I'll also mention the difficulties and challenges in making these sections possible.
Front page review:
The front page contains a basic login and password form, along with a preview version of our scoreboard. Although, this idea of putting the scoreboard on the front page came late in the game, we found it useful to help advertise the current status of our application with regards to providing evidence of user traffic and ratings. The front-page version of the scoreboard is not all that different from the actual scoreboard, except that some links are not featured unless you have logged in with an account. The gray panels and use of reusable components makes the composition of this page very useful in context, by providing information on match events, teams events and individual player's scoring. A future improvement would be to provide a live scoring data provider that would emulate statistics on the fly through 5 minute increments or whenever it spots a new change in the system. This would be beneficial by reducing the number of whole-page refreshes and enhancing the user experience by providing a persistent way of retrieving data.
Profile page review:
The profile page went through minimal amounts of change due to its limited usages other than finding out more about the player participating in the game. Although, the profile page makes for very little use, I've come to find that there are many ways of approaching this section. I looked around on mostly social networking sites, including TechHui, Facebook and Twitter to gain some inspiration and possible commonalities. I narrowed down some details of a user profile to only include, the user's first and last name, location, contact number, email address and biographical information. The only required field is the email address, since it serves the purpose of your login name and our source of sending out game match invitations and updates. The main profile page also replicates information regarding a listing of user's team affiliates and current team events. The profile page successfully makes use of the qualified standard gray panels, and a simple-to-read 3-column layout. The profile section also includes "manage" and "browse" sub-pages. The Profile Manage section gives the player the ability to make changes to their profile information. The only ability that it lacks at this point is a way to add additional social networking aliases, modifiy email address, and the choice of choosing a different profile avatar. The addition of other social networking aliases is as simple as creating a textfield. At this point, there is no "right" way of changing a user's email address since the user's account information is dependent on it as an identifier in the system. Hopefully in future enhancements, we'll incorporate an interface to attribute to this feature of changing a user's email, and getting a email notification of the account being modified. Of course to preserve the integrity of our system, we'll need to require a primary email address to send that account modification. Another neat enhancement would be to enable a user the ability to modify their avatar on the system by providing a local image upload. This would require a persistent storage location on our public servers and a limited file size.
Team page review:The team management section is in itself very functional and simple to use. The team creation process is straightforward, users will not have very much difficultly in getting the hang of things here. I could only point out certain enhancements rather than any noticeable flaws in this section. Although, the co-creator of this section did indicate in the issues listing about a potential "weakness" to the user-to-team invitations handling. This may be a confounding factor that needs to be addressed in the next implementation stages of Devcathlon, but as for now, it sits deep under the covers.
Match page review:The match management section gives a listing of all involving team matches. It gives you the ability to create, update and destroy matches. The only disadvantage is through the ease of finding an existing match. There is no mechanism to browse for matches, but it would help to supply a way to immediately find a match rather than scrolling through a large column listing. Maybe we can incorporate similar pages implemented by the user profile and team management sections. This would require two additional pages, called "Match Browse" and "Match Profile." The match browse page will include a table listing all matches, and on each row a link to its respected match profile page.
Scoreboard page review:The scoreboard page includes a listing of all matches, team line-ups and their respective members, match events, comments, and top developers for that match. This page did a good job of portaying that information in a clear way. My only problem is that it would be difficult to display multiple team match line-ups, where matches can consist of more than one participating team. The Hall of Fame page is included as a scoreboard sub-page that gives an overview listing of wins, losses, points accumulated per match, and most valuable players. I only wished that this page had more visual references rather than just plain-old text and links.
Top 5 lessons learned:
- Time management - Time is the quintessential factor in everyone's life. I found it difficult in many cases, but had to ground myself to accepting the fact that I do have issues in this area. I have learned through this experience to be patient and better plan out ahead of what needs to get done. This holds a large part in my leadership skills too, since managing other people calls for good planning and time management skills.
- Leadership skills - I think that I've become a better person from being given the title of a "leader." In many ways, it has improved my outlook of managing a small team in such a large setting. At first I was somewhat doubtful that I could accomplish it, but I eventual grew out of the fear and simply started to care. I started to care for the project and its respected team members. This helped bring me closer to the individuals in my team as well as other project members.
- Control - I think that controlling that programmer's ego is a must in a large project setting. It's very different from critiquing your own work as oppose to being able to endure criticism from others. I've learned to respect others opinions to find a common solution. Eventually once you've set aside your ego, you'll notice a difference in the mood that you bring to the atmosphere. I learned to control that atmosphere through just being lightly assertive, but straight to the point.
- Collaboration - Collaborating with my team members weren't very difficult, but it had some confounding factors such as its frequency and effectiveness. The effective route is to meet as often as possible. It's very simply stated, but it turned out to work in our situation with a group of eight people. We also incorporated pair programming as a way to keep each individual on their toes.
- Forgive and forget - Sometimes you just gotta forgive and forget. Its difficult already that this project posed a challenge for many of us, but adding to that tension could have led to some adverse effects. I'm glad that this group had that notion of forgiveness. It was quite evident during those milestones that just did not work out as we planned. We would rarely hold personal grudges towards another individual. It was sometimes nice to just talk about it rather than tuning out the whole problem.
Now, for some people, this is the time to put up their hardhats and salute to a good year of eventful meetings, to staying up late coding, and to enduring all those emails with the subject line starting with "[Devcathlon] ..." I'm not sure about others, but I'll sure be missing that feeling of being needed for a project and looking forward to just doing something the next day. This project brought in a mixed set of individuals with different skills and backgrounds, but with one common goal of making this project the best it could be. I could not have asked more from these group of highly talented people. Their dedication and hard work has paid off, and I hope that everyone takes something from this into their own personal endeavors in life. I know that I'll take this experience and be able to apply what I've learned into any setting. The time we sacrificed; those bloody hours at the keyboard; those late nights sipping on energy drinks, and those times when all you could think about was "Devcathlon" will now become a memory. Even as unfortunate as that may sound to a few, it has made a profound impact on what I see in a large team setting. The beginnings were difficult, but over time we progressed from novices to experts in our own way. This experience has challenged myself and others mentally and somewhat physically. This project has given me ways to express myself more freely than I usually do in any other class related setting. It has taught me to be ethical, respectful, resourceful and passionate about goals. It has also taught me to become a better person by encouraging me to open up to all sorts of people. I'll honestly miss that energy, and all those who made this project what it is today. I hope to find that same spark during my attempt at enhancing this project for this year's Google Summer of Code. I'm sorry that not all original members of the team will be participating, but I am grateful for their respectful input and support. Good luck to everyone, and thanks for all the hard work!
No comments:
Post a Comment