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Project Time Management is Key - Abram Wallace
My group encountered many problems throughout the semester that we had no idea would happen. I am going to cover some of these problems and the solution or work around to help you in case you come across the same thing.
Problem 1 STORE
There are many options for you to use for version control. What we thought the easiest one would be is STORE. It is built into VisualWorks and we are using VisualWorks to make our program so it makes sense to use it. While it may be the easiest way I think we put too much trust in it. How STORE works is when you merge 2 different versions of the same program it tries to figure out what is new and what is old. If there are 2 different versions of the same method it will ask you which one you want to keep. Having 4 people working on different parts of the project at the same time, it is hard to know whats the one you want to use especially if it isn't you who worked on it. Several times we had methods come back that we had deleted 2 or 3 times before without explanation. Someone must have had the old version with that method and since it was not in the new version STORE asks them if they want to add it. The only way we were able to get rid of the unwanted code was to have everyone on their computers delete it and then merge with the STORE. One unexplained problem that we had with STORE and never understood was that when I would upload my changes it wouldn't upload my changes. I saved the file, tested it, everything was working how we wanted, and then I would publish to STORE. Then I would load the published file and test it. None of my changes were there and it was like from 2 versions ago. We were done at midnight that night but stayed in the library until about 2 or 3am trying to get store to take the new file. We eventually gave up and didn't understand it. To fix this I just filed out my .st file and emailed it to my group since mine was the most recent and had every ones changes. It is always a good idea to double check everything. Do not put too much trust in STORE. Make sure the changes that happen from the merge are the changes you want.
Problem 2 Seems Easy Enough...
The most difficult and time consuming homework was M6. That is were you do most of your programing and actually get everything running. In comparison to that all of the other milestones seemed easy enough. That is until we got to M9. M9 is the last milestone and it happened at the end of the semester when we all have other projects, homeworks, and finals coming up. It was also worth only 5% of our grade so we started to care less and less. Not only did M9 happen at a bad time but no one in our group knew how to write HTML. M9 started off being just as much if not more work then all the other milestones but was worth a smaller amount. We just didn't want to do it. But we didn't want to give up. We began searching on the internet anything we could find on html and smalltalk. Then we started to look on the swiki at the old case studies. We found a few walk throughs on how to set up visualworks for web development but nothing too helpful. Then we searched again and found a case study where a team had put up their M9 and did a step by step tutorial on setting it up. They used a lot of different stuff so we were not able to use all of their code but being able to see an example of what we are supposed to do help out greatly. We would not have been able to do M9 if we did not look at the old swiki. Which is ironic because at the beginning of the semester we all thought that we would never use the swiki. You would be surprised what all is on there to help you out. Make sure you give it a look.
Problem 3 I don't need to go to class. Everything is on the slides.
This was not a major problem for my group because everyone had a general idea of what they had to do and knew how to do it. Everything you need to know for the homework is covered in class. Especially in the beginning, for one of the homework I just made a few changes to the example the professor did in class. But sometimes its hard to go to class. Sleeping in is much better. We usually had at least one person in the group go to class. This came in handy at times when we would get stuck and not know what to do. Someone would ask "How are we supposed to do that? That doesn't make any sense." And someone else would say "Oh he went over that in class today. Its in the slides. I think I might have it in my notes." The slides are helpful and are exactly what is taught in class but most of the time the serve as an outline. It is hard to make sense of the slides on their own. But if you go to the lecture and see the slides as he teaches it helps them to make sense. The slides should only be used as a reference. There is no replacement for going to class.
I hope that this covers some of the future problems you might have. These were just some of the problems we had with our project that I thought should be addressed. We had a few smalltalk problems like message not understood etc etc but everyone has those problems and you are prepared for those. We were not prepared for STORE to give us such a problem. The only sure way to help with problems is to start early. The earlier you start on your homework the more time you will have to account for problems.
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