Milestone 1 at 10.11.2015

Objectives

• Have a running back-end server
• Synchronize the team in terms of development environment setup
• Implement following functionalities for web and Android applications:
  • User registration
  • User login
  • Contribution creation
  • Contribution reading

Major work

• Design of the user and contribution tables (with their dependent tables)
• Java Servlets for:
  • User registration
  • User login
  • Contribution creation
  • Listing of all contributions
  • Retrieval of logged in user's information
• Java Class for database connection
• An HTML page implementing following functionality with JavaScript:
  • Login
  • Signup
  • Contribute
  • List all contributions
• An android application implementing following functionality:
  • Login
  • Signup
  • Contribute
  • List all contributions (Both guests and registered users)

Description and evidence

Back-end and web application repository

Web application

Android application

Milestone presentation slides

Assessment

How well the objectives were met

All objectives were met. But after seeing milestone presentations of other groups, we decided to deploy an eye-candy template for web application.

Tools and technologies

All back-end code was written in Java using Servlets. As database we used MySQL. NetBeans IDE was preferred due to its painless installation process of necessary software stack.

Web front-end was developed in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Android application was developed using Android Studio.

Git was used (through GitHub) for version controlling. GitHub issues was used to keep track of work done.

Slack was used for the communication of the important information (information that you don't want to lose between countless number of WhatsApp messages). Other than that communication was on WhatsApp.

Execution of plan

Plan is executed as in the project plan.

Team process management

Alignment with customer

After our milestone presentation, we discussed with our instructors (Suzan Üsküdarlı and Alp Kındıroğlu). After the milestone, they were worried about our understanding of the project. Because the sample contributions in the application weren't reflecting its purpose. Contributions about different topics were presented on the same page. This mistake had two sources:

1. We didn't take enough time to populate our sample database with care.
2. This milestone's objectives doesn't include the implementation of the tags (high level concepts of our system).

Actions planned based on your assessments

We realized that we should have presented it, after telling our audience following story:

Our system doesn't have tags yet. Tags represent our system's high level concepts. For this demo, assume that we clicked on "Volkswagen's emission scandal" tag and landed on that page.

For the next milestone we plan to present mock-ups for not implemented parts and go over them bu telling a hypothetical story until landing on a page which is implemented. Then the demo will continue with implemented pages.

Brief description of next milestone

For the next milestone at 01.12.2015 we plan to implement:

• Rating system
• Comment system

We also plan to make an exploratory research on graph visualization algorithms and frameworks.