ITSR21 - QuotaTracker testing

This week I have been testing the tracker application, its fairly lightweight so there are not many things to test. However I wish to avoid what happened with the scholarship project so this time I have planned the following;

Test plan

• check application starts and runs
• Check application can log in user when passed through from ease authentication
• Check application initiates scan and records correct figures
• Check application displays correctly in browser
• check application outputs correct data for user quota
• check application correctly displays drill down data
• Can I manipulate the application by hacking the url parameters

I have gone through all these tests this week and I am happy that it can successfully perform the above tasks.

The application will be peer tested next week before the go live.

Project: ITSR21 - Media Quota tracker

I have recently been working on a project for the Multi media team, they provide a service for students and staff which allows them to upload audio files the their server for download and streaming. They currently were billing the service annually according to storage capacity and there was currently no system which measured how much server space was being used.

I met with Alex Carter the section manager and we discussed his requirements, and the resulting brief was to build a system which would perform a scan of a directory structure, store the users names and the amount of media stored they have stored on the server. The media was stored in two sets of directories, one for podcasts and another for streaming.

At the same time the application will connect to the media teams database, one of the challanges presented was how we could connect to the Apple based LDAP system which the data was stored on.

As part of of the brief I was required to specify the programming language to produce the application with and suitable server software to support it.

The resulting data is stored in its own MySQL database and can be displayed through a series of password protected web pages.

This task is repeated every month and gives the reporting information required to administer billing of the storage accounts.

This is a smaller project than the dev team is used to however that makes me an ideal candidate to build it.

As always there is supporting information in the evidence folder to support.

The project has been the first time I have had end to end control over the development process. I was responsible for producing the following:

• System design specification
• Recommending free, open source CFML engine
• Prototype (if required)
• database systems
• Coldfusion application

Other factors I would encounter along the way were:

• Install and configure Apache Tomcat
• Install and configure Railo
• configure scheduled task in Railo's web administrator
• remote desktop administration to windows and mac

Things I learned about along the way were:

• data structures in Coldfusion
• scope
• modularising functions
• passing data between functions

One of the main things I've taken away from this project is organisation, when I studied Adobe's learning guide it guides you through building the art gallery application. The way that build is structured puts all the action into the forms, there are one or two configuration pages possibly outwith the browsers reach but in general what you see and what it does are in the same page.

In practice I have learned to use a framework to support the application which removes the functionality from the publicly available web pages. Further to this I have also learned how to further modularise the components providing the functionality.

I got some fantastic help which really pinpointed my weak spots as a result of me trying failing & trying succeeding. sometimes the help I get is a bit vague and sits a wee bit higher than my knowledge can reach.

As a direct result of the help being just a bit more explanatory I was able to create a pseudo Model View Controller software architecture, connect to and run queries against Apples LDAP system.

Footnote

During this project am having trouble due to the snow, I've been stuck at home this week because of the bad weather.

Where I've had difficulties in the project I have been emailing Martin Jones for help. Ive also been putting alot of extra hours into the project due to being snowed in at home all day.

VM Server - Nightside

This week I have been given the task of setting up the new server procured by our department.

This project is being led by Bill Lee our manager as he wishes to use virtual operation systems as a mean for development, developers would then be able to log into the system to whichever operating system they needed to develop for whether that be a unix or windows environment.

The task will consist of the following:

• register the new server on the network
• install a unix based operating system
• install the virtualisation software
• test the system

During my discussion with Bill this week he has stated that he wished to use Ubuntu 10 due it being supported by the unix community and the VMware virtual server 2 software.

This will be my sole task at the moment.

Computer Rep: New user PIE

Ok, first computer rep work, the task is as follows;

• re image a machine for the user
• raise a CMS call to set the user up for development services.
• arrange administrator rights for his workstation
• arrange server space
• add him to the various internal workgroups
• add drive mappings
• add any other software to his distributed desktop

I raised this call on Friday morning implement the changes needed for most of the above, naturally most of it is still undone and our new guys started this morning. I have placed a copy of the cms call into the evidence folder. Unfortunately I cant provide any evidence of it all being done.

Re imaging the machine is the part I physically do, the rest is arranging for support services to put things in place for us.

To PIE a machine all we are really doing is wiping the old system and pulling a windows image from the server which will be linked to his user account which will in turn be set up for our new guy. We make sure it all works then just await confirmation from support to say that everything is done.

End of week update

Last week was semi productive, the first half I was working on ITS042, however I had estimated this work to take a maximum of three days. My analysis took a morning, the remedial work took a day and I used the majority of an afternoon for testing. I took time to update visual source safe so all documents I had worked on were up to date and made sure that anything that could be affected by my changes were not negatively affected.

By the time day 3 of the project came round I found myself with no work and I had to keep myself busy somehow.

I arranged to demonstrate the results of the project to the project manager, that way I had a third party visually confirm completion and satisfaction. I assisted another developer with some issues she had with scripts written for the old student migration project.

I also done a PIE for a new developer who was starting this morning, I'll post about that next.

Mairi has pointed me at subjects like Polopoly (the content management system on the university's website) to read up on and try to understand, there is a working instance on the development server so I could also go mess around with it. the things there is Polopoly takes days of class training followed by days of on the job training so I don't know if I could extract anything I can use with it over the time I have, its still worth a play with though!

At the moment I don't have a workload, I have asked for one and have been since Wednesday night, however people are busy and it cant be easy finding work for me. The problem though is that with a project to work on I cant code my time against anything.

My worry is that I cant account for my time on Friday, nothing I did was a university sanctioned project and I cant just say that I used the time to study.

Secondly, I don't like having nothing to do, I am here to develop as a professional and I now have three days where I didn't do that.

Thirdly, I feel like everyone around me is contributing to the momentum of the department, I know that at the moment I'm not and I don't like that.

Project: ITS042 - IS Website external event booking

This week I have been working on the IS Website, particularly the events booking section for external users.

The university has a single sign on system, I've probably mentioned this before but the concept is sign on once and your in. The system is called EASE and external users have EASE friends accounts, in this case the unique identifier is substituted for their email address.

Towards the end of STU188 I was asked to give a quote for work to be done on this section of the site, it had been built before I came here and it had failed testing. I was lucky enough to be given it as a project to fix.

To quote the project, I had to find the fault and advise the project manager what the fault was and how long it would take to fix. I gave a time scale of three days, to account for my ability and what I thought was wrong which was an incorrect table join which returned more rows than it should hence it would just throw the system off.

During one of the down periods of infinite I worked on this to tide myself over so when the time came I was ready with a solution.

I've been working on the project yesterday and today, I still have tomorrow and I now have a working website with no errors. The code I had prepared only needed a little work to make it fit in with the rest of the software, I had developed it in SQL developer and it was going into a ColdFusion project so some commentary conflicted and I tested everything three times.

Some other issues have been that this is the first time I have had to use the development server and Secure Shell to access it, the source control system Visual Source Safe was not up to date so any code I booked out to work on was out of date and didn't match the code quoted in the error messages and I was also given the wrong code package to start work on, confusing for a new guy.

This is another good project and tested my knowledge and problem solving ability, I can say I'm pleased with it.

Appraisal

Today was my first appraisal as a developer, and it went very well. This has really been the first opportunity where I could get some peer feedback.

At the meeting was myself and Bill and we spent just over an hour, running over from an originally planned 45 minutes.

The first topic covered was what projects I had been a part of, so far these have been:

• STU186 - Student counselling data migration
• STU188 - Scholarships application system
• STU176 - Postgraduate progression management database (aka PPMD)
• RES032 - INFINITE
  

Bill had commented that there was initially a plan for my development, there were three projects lined up which I was to play a part in with a gradual easing through Coldfusion and DBMS. As these initial projects fell through the way my training was going to develop fell to the mercy of the available projects which came in the order written above. As a result the order in which I worked on the different languages and methodologies was out and I was handed larger projects then would normally be assigned, generally I would take this a bit of flattery however when I mentioned to Bill that I took the STU188 build from end to end he was genuinely surprised, which in turn surprised me.

Going forward we have agreed on an outline for my development which will centre around ColdFusion and DBMS in alternating cycles (where workflow requirements allow). Bill's opinion is that by concentrating on these two packages I should be capable of standing on my own feet by February which is encouraging indeed.

We also spoke about taking on the BOXI business objects system, we only really summarised this as CF and DBMS will take priority and it may not be wise to throw in another package to learn while still developing a skillset for these.

BOXI is essentially a MI (Management Information) tool, it allows a user to create MI reports with drag and drop functionality, so if I want a report on XYZ then I can drag them from a menu and drop them on the page and BOXI will do all the work for me. The main thing being that you dont need to know SQL to be able to produce reports, in my opinion I need to know SQL, once I have solidified skills in SQL I will feel ready to move on to BOXI development. We both agreed on this.

As I said this meeting was very productive and encouraging and I look forward to consistently hitting these objectives set for me.