For this week’s blog, I will be talking about our second sprint working on the open source food pantry project. This sprint was a bit unique as to the first one since it is mostly about communicating with the customer.

In this sprint, I learned a lot about the communication between us, the developers, and the customer. I learned that it is not a simple process. At first, I thought that it would just be a simple interaction, they give us what they want or how it should look like, and then we try to create it and meet their demands. But that is not how it goes at all. There was a lot of interaction that we needed to do since the customer does not know what they really wanted. There is also the issue of communication. Most of the time, it is hard to get hold of the customer and we have to wait for them to respond to us before we could even move on with what we are doing. I also learned that starting a new project is like an open-ended question. while planning on this project and asking the customer questions as to what they want, it just seems like they do not really know what they want.

During this sprint, we have decided to change our focus from making the foodsaver REST API onto making the food pantry software since the other team has already made it. This sprint was mostly about communicating with our customers. The first meeting with the customer is with Serena. Serena works on Thea’s food pantry and knows how the pantry operates.  During the interview, we asked how the pantry operates. They have a google form that is filled out once by every student that goes there. It asks about the number of people in their household, their income level( whether they qualify or not), and what kind of help or services they are already receiving. If they already filled out the form, they only need to swipe their card preferably but for now, they just take note of the student’s ID number. Then they weigh the items that are being taken by the student and record it. They only keep track of how much weight is taken and how much weight is left on the pantry. 

The second meeting that we had was with Joanne, she has been helping guide the student-led-food-pantry initiative. Before our meeting with her, we tried to come up with questions to ask. Most of the questions we came up with was just a clarification on the information we got on the first meeting. In our meeting with Joanne, we asked her again about the forms and what kind of information they are storing. Since they cannot give us private information, we asked if she could just blur out the pieces of information and leave the column headers. This meeting was mostly trying to learn what the food pantry does and how they get food in and out. This meeting also opened the topic with the one card system and how they want it to show information about the student once they swipe.

From the blog cs-wsu – Computer Science by csrenz and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

In this blog, I will be talking about our first sprint retrospective. My team is working on making free food pantry software.  In the first few days of class, we were doing research on different food pantry software. There was not much we could find that is open source and free which kinda sucks since food pantries are not for profit. Since these softwares are not free, we could not even demo them, therefore it was hard to get an idea on what this software should look like and what functionalities it should have.

After getting assigned into teams, our first sprint started. The first day we all sat together, there was some initial set up that we had to do so that we could communicate with each other and have tasks assigned to each of the members. We set up a task board using trello, joined the slack group for our team, and shared everyone’s contacts and git usernames. In our second meeting, we were trying to figure out where to start. We know that we were working on a food pantry software but we were not sure as to what we should actually be doing since other colleges are working on the same software as well. Then I saw on the slack channel that the other channel that they needed a REST API. So we started planning.

The first thing that we talked about is what functionality this REST API would have. The only thing we know is that we need this API to read a JSON file from the USDA’s website. After looking through the file, there was a lot of information about food and their expiration and some other stuff like tips on cooking or if they need to be refrigerated. Since we know that we are gonna be hosting this API we discussed on where to host it. There were a couple of options but we settled with Heroku since there is a free tier option although it might be a slower service since it has a thirty seconds time out when your API is not being used. Then we talked about which language we are gonna use. Researching about reading a JSON file, most of the tutorials were in Java and since we all have experience using Java, we have settled on it. The next thing was setting up an initial commit on gitlab for our project. Most of it was done by Sean and he was handling most of the task board as well. While the others work on figuring out how to host our API on Heroku.

To host a Java application on Heroku you need three things:

1. Java 8* 
2. Maven 3*
3. Heroku CLI and an Account

After that, we researched how to read and write a JSON file. We are using JSON.simple to parse the foodkeeper.json file.

Steps I took:

1. Download JSON.simple jar file
2. Import the jar file into Eclipse by adding it to your project’s build path
3. Added json.simple dependency into the pom.xml file
   1. <dependency>
          <groupId>com.googlecode.json-simple</groupId>
          <artifactId>json-simple</artifactId>
          <version>1.1.1</version>
      </dependency>

There are a few tips on reading the JSON file.  JSON file consists of array and objects so you just have to create an object or an array depending on what you are trying to get.

ex. Array [], Object {}

A JSON file might have something like this:

“sheets”: [
{
“name”: “Version”,

“data”: [

That means that there is an array called sheets, and an object inside the array called “name”. You can get to it by creating a JSON object first and then creating a JSON array like this:

Object obj = new JSONParser().parse(new FileReader(“foodkeeper.json”));

JSONObject jo = (JSONObject) obj;
JSONArray sheets = (JSONArray) jo.get(“sheets”);

We still have a lot to do, so hopefully, on the next sprint we could implement and get all the necessary information from the JSON file and have methods to return them as an object or as a JSON file.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Computer Science by csrenz and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This past week has been about trying to get the ng2-amrs environment working, and trying to get through the errors that show up when running the npm start command. I have learned a lot of the steps to take in order to approach this problem, although I am still not finished with it. I am not sure that I would proceed differently, I just think it would have been better if these problems were already known, since everyone is having them, and it would have been better if there were more instructions to deal with these expected problems. Most of the approach involves googling error messages, which can definitely be applied in other situations.

Most of the week was spent looking up different npm, ng and node commands, googling error messages, and trying different combinations of the commands and re-installing things after nothing worked. The reason that I took these steps is because I really do not know what I am doing and running through permutations of commands seems to be the only way to move forward to get the program to run without errors. A lot of the process involved referring to the slack channels, where teammates and other teams have run into the same problems and found solutions.

The ng2-amrs readme on the github page says to run the ng serve command for a dev server. What it does not say is what to do when this does not work. A guess at the problem involves version issues with angular, npm and node. Different versions were attempted to try to solve errors. Most of the steps involve googling the error message, which leads to a stackoverflow post that says to install a certain thing that solves the problem. When it does not solve the problem, it becomes very unclear what to do next. Changing versions and re-installing things has not seemed to work.

I have deleted and re-cloned the ng2-amrs folder from github. When I run the ng serve command, I currently see an error Could not find module “@angular-devkit/build-angular”. I google this and stackoverflow tells me to run npm install –save-dev @angular-devkit/build-angular. After I do this and re-try ng serve, a few more errors show up that do not seem to be as easy to deal with. One teammate found npm-check that will list missing things and things that are out of date, so I installed and ran that and had it automatically install everything it found using npm-check -y. After that finished, I re-tried ng serve, and it came back with a new error about styles.scss. I searched the error and found a command npm rebuild node-sass to deal with it. Running ng serve again, now I get some typescript errors. I check the group slack channel and see the command npm start, so I try that, and the next error I see is Error: Can’t resolve ‘pouchdb/dist/pouchdb’. I try running npm install and that brings back the scss error, but this time the same command that fixed it before does not fix it anymore, and it complains that I use a 64-bit operating system. I downgraded to node 8.12.0 and re-tried fixing styles.scss and running npm start. It actually seems to be working now. It says compiled with warnings, I open localhost:3000 in my browser and the ampath page comes up.

From the blog cs-wsu – klapointe blog by klapointe2 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.