CST 499 - Week 1

This week we read the article on effective meetings. I found the information to be quite interesting, and I believe they will definitely be helpful for teams. I think that having a clear goal for a meeting, and then coming to the meeting prepared with that goal in mind, is probably the one of the most important aspects to grasp for an effective meeting to occur. I know in my workplace that we try to have clear goals and ideas prior to meetings, and will prepare with each other prior to attendance. It is also important to follow up after meetings to see if the decisions reached and objectives set are being achieved. I find it interesting when considering meetings how much hangs upon work prior to and after the meeting itself, even though it is the focal point of that activity.

CST 438 - Week 8

This week concluded our course. We took the final, which was our last assignment in the process. Overall I enjoyed the course, it was quite a learning experience. It feels like it went by really quickly and that we covered a lot of ground, but I enjoyed it. It was truly a great hands-on learning experience, especially getting to work alongside my team and have regular meetings and a chat room where we congregated and discussed pressing matters, the design of the project and what needed attention at the moment. I learned a lot spending time with the team and utilizing github’s branches for the project as well.

CST 438 - Week 7

This week we began wrapping up our project for final submission. We each worked hard to implement various design patterns into our project for the assignment. I worked on implementing dependency injection in the Alert Controller project and as part of that created a database and database management file along with an updated set of alert controller test cases to ensure that they tested properly with the dependency injection. We all got together and ensured the completion of our various patterns and their accuracy. It was really interesting to work on the project overall with all my teammates one last time. It seems like it was just yesterday when we were first getting to know each other at the start of our program.

CST 438 - Week 6

This week we started our foray into Design Patterns and their application. We spent time this week studying some of the many various patterns that have been established for use by designers and are working on implementing designs into our own project. As part of the reading this week we were supposed to study a variety of different design patterns. I decided to look into the Filter, Bridge, Facade, Mediator, Iterator, Observer, Strategy, MVC, Singleton, and
Prototype Patterns. I thought the Bridge was an interesting pattern to learn about in particular as the bridges allow for the functionality of the concrete classes to remain independent of the interface implementing classes, I also was surprised by some of the similarities between the Mediator and Bridge Patterns. One pattern that stood out to me was the Facade Pattern and it seems like this is one pattern that developers may implement without even knowing it as many of the “under the hood” methods and functioning are often hidden from the end user as they utilize an entirely different interface with the program. It was also nice to study up on the MVC pattern, which I believe my team and I will be working on this next week, we’ve had a few things come up this past week but are planning on setting aside a few days to work on the project together.

CST 438 - Week 5

This week was an interesting one. I had a few things pop up in my personal life that made things a little hectic for a brief period during the week. But the instructions were quite interesting this week as far as homework went. Some of the team, including myself, were somewhat unfamiliar with the tasks necessary for the coursework as well as the stack we are using, but luckily AB aided us in getting up to speed and walked us through the how to set up our environment and get started working on the project and how to write the test units for the project. We worked together on the unit tests on our branches for the project.

CST 438 - Week 4

This week we had quite a bit of reading and videos to cover for our assignments. It was interesting to go through and see others research about what were some of the most common reasons for failures in a project. The disasters that can result from misunderstandings and miscommunication are quite apparent and the emphasis for the need to clarify and comprehend each other when working with others was glaring. It was also interesting to see just how important the creation of requirements are in the beginning, and through the lifespan, of a project. Miscommunication, unclear requirements or a lack of all the necessary stakeholders can doom a project to failure even before production can start. This week we had a group project consisting of creating diagrams for our upcoming project. It was nice to work with everyone and hammer out a schedule to meet and work on tasks.

CST 438 - Week 3

This week we had quite a few interesting articles and videos to cover for our assignment. We covered “white box” testing which is an interesting and seemingly straightforward way to test a program. There was some testing called EP/BVA which was very new to me with its boundary checking which was a little weird to think about given the example application. I did have a little trouble understanding what the author was meaning in some of the questions that had grammatical errors, but overall it was an interesting and worthwhile article. We also are starting to get into stride on our project, deciding when to conveniently communicate and where to start working on the project.