STU199 - ECA miniportfolio - Design

The familiarisation period is now finished and this week I am now working on the design document. I've also had two days leave, monday and tuesday so three days on the SDS out of five.

What I have done is try my best to automate the manual processes already in the software, as the current system works reasonably well. There does appear to be holes in the processes though, some of it must be done manually around the hard coded areas. It surprises me that they are able to keep track of all the changes that need to be made in this application.

To produce the specification I have followed the business requirements document (BRD), investigated coldfusion functions and data structures and seen what would be suitable for this applications needs.

The original database schema requires some updates I am including a lookup table for the staff and course relationship and adding in a staff table. Extra fields are still being defined at the moment and I am awaiting further information on this.

I have also been consulting with mike mcmonagle, another developer here, he has been reviewing my work.

So far I have been testing methods of automation of some processes and adapting my database to suit.

I will be submitting my design for approval today and I will update when I get it back, it is likely since this is my first big design task that I may need to make a few changes.

Meeting

We also had a progress meeting today, this was more focused around the storage solution being worked on by Riky in devtech, with the servers we are using being load balance over two machines that means we needed to work out how we can store files which would be available to both machines and allow both reading and writing by each server.

This has introduced the issue of disaster recovery, how we recover this file system seems to be more difficult than than the issue of storage itself. I have been asked to try and work out a coldfusion system of recovery, this system should check both servers local storage for inconsistencies and then copy the files between machines to ensure the shared storage now holds the correct data and that none has been lost while the system was down.