Our first sprint was rather difficult and unproductive. We did not start off with many clear goals, so we weren’t able to move forward much and had no clear direction. This is definitely a huge hurdle and one I hope we can get over soon. Our group would definitely benefit from clear, tangible goals and perhaps a little more structure. Other than that, we had many productive and insightful conversations about the needs and features necessary to the application we are trying to develop for the food pantry.

One of the things I worked on a little bit was trying to find a way to interpret the a data set so that we can further search and manipulate it. The data source was provided from our professor and our goal was to find a way to display that information in a way that could interact with a REST API interface. A great help to this end was an article found by group member Andy Pham. Using the exact code by the provided article works to some degree, although the field headers need to be changed to appropriately handle the data set for the food pantry project. This doesn’t seem like it will be too difficult moving forwards, although there is still a little work to be done in this department to finish it up. Overall, in this task I think we are headed in the right direction and nearly complete. However, I question how useful this work will be, as we may find out that a lot of this beginning work is already complete by another group or another university.

Another big goal of ours is to set up a server that can run this REST API so we can use it across the network. My team members have been doing research into what resources we can use and what would be best, however it is a choice that is hard to make when we cant consider any of the other needs of the project (yet). This server doesn’t need to be big or complicated, as with what we have we would only need to host a small data set as well as a pretty simple REST API interface to interpret said data set. However, we are unsure where this server will be hosted or who will front any potential costs.

It is challenging having no practical or finished work to show, as it highlights a lack of progress and means we have no reference for how we are performing. However, I think as the ball gets rolling and our project goals become clear we can build up momentum and reach our goals as they come to us. In the meantime, Team FIG has been using our time to discuss what we could potentially need to work on and other elements of the project. We have looked up different universities and food banks solutions and what programs they used to maintain their databases, and are considering what might work for our University.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Let's Get TechNICKal by technickal4 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This week was sprint 1. Sprint 1 was a rather simple and basic sprint that started with getting into teams and diving into the workload. The most work that was done for sprint 1 was done before getting into teams. Getting setup for the sprint required a lot of work, like filling out the CATME survey and getting your availability schedule together. Once we finished our prep work for the team formation, we got into our groups. Once we got our assigned groups we began sprint 1. Our first assignment was given to us by Professor Wurst. We had two tasks, one being to prepare a REST API for the food pantry and the other being finding a way to host a json file from a government organization. I took the lead on finding out how to host a server for our json file while other members of the group worked on researching REST APIs and figuring out more information on our project. Professor Wurst suggested a few options for hosting our server for free, digital ocean and heroku. I looked at digital ocean first but quickly found out that it actually costs money (a per month subscription) for us to host a server to store our json file on. After finding this out I looked into heroku. Heroku is a free service that lets you host a server for free (albeit they do limit you to a certain amount of server size/space as to avoid people from abusing the system by hosting large applications for no cost). I took on the task of doing a tutorial on heroku, which was rather simple. I went through the windows powershell to follow along with the survey. I learned a few of the heroku Java application specific commands, such as preparing the app (this was a simple process that uses the git commands to clone/pull/fork projects from github/gitlab), launching the app (heroku create), viewing heroku build logs, and scaling dynos. Dynos are specific to heroku, and are basically small containers that live within the heroku server that run your applicaiton. You can scale the amount of dynos per application to affect its performance (however you are limited to a certain number of dynos per application), and I learned that scaling down to 0 dynos does not allow it to launch the application. I feel like heroku is very similar to angular in the sense that there are commands to build/launch/diagnose applications, however angular is more of a “coding” application because you can edit code and run it all within the angular platform. Another large difference between angular and heroku is the language used to host the servers. We as a group settled on heroku for Java because we are all most comfortable using Java as it is our primary programming language. After completing the heroku tutorial I looked at the git repository that was shared with our group by Professor Wurst. I think that as a group we are unsure where to go from this point, as we have not been assigned any solid tasks yet. My hope is that for sprint 2 we can dive into the project more and will be assigned tangible tasks that we can complete for our end users.

From the blog CS@Worcester – The Average CS Student by Nathan Posterro and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Getting started with our first sprint, we were tasked with a few familiar tasks which included:

– Creating a GitHub repo for our team so that we could fork the AMPATH/ng2-amrs repositories
– Cloning the repos onto our local computers so we could edit/build the code
– And lastly set up our development environment to be ready so that when we have the back-end server up and running we could start immediately.

The first two tasks were pretty straight forward but when it came to setting up our environment we had many difficulties.
– The first of many difficulties was getting an error that stated we were missing some style.css packages. Since half of our team got this error we dedicated a large part of our time to figuring out what was wrong. James figured out that we had to install the missing packages, specifically ng2-ion-range-slider which got rid of this error. Starting npm was not an issue after this case.
– The second main issue we had to learn to work through were missing environments which I and Gulshan had. I found that since we never ran npm start, we wouldn’t have the environment. This fix took quite some time to figure out also but now most of us are on the same page; waiting for the back-end server to get set up.

There were many steps we tried that failed, some of which ate up a chunk of our time working as a team. We tried deleting and recloning the repos which did not work. We tried installing npm numerous times over and over but the result was the same. I believe most of our successes came from trial and error. We constantly tried updating all of our working environments, researched on stackoverflow, and worked collectively as a team helping one another to figure out our problems. Throughout the week whenever one of us made progress towards ridding one error we would post in our 404 slack channel for others to see; keeping constant communication.

If I were to instruct another individual who wishes to start working on this project I would be sure to have them follow a series of steps as well as solutions to errors that they might encounter. Before beginning anything I would suggest updating all versions of node and npm to the latest. From there, the first command to try and run is to be npm start in the working directory. If there are no errors then localhost:3000 should be all set, else if there are missing packages I suggest installing the ion package that was missing for most of us. We did not encounter any other sort of errors so I don’t know what else could go wrong.

Onto Sprint-2!

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

          We learned quite a bit in our first sprint for the AMPATH project which ranged from troubleshooting compiling errors to understanding team dynamics. After some reflection, I found that the mutual troubleshooting that our team did allowed us to bypass any icebreakers that were needed. We were able to professionally and respectfully look into each other’s problems while making sure that no one was left in the dark. After learning about our team dynamic, I will proceed to do more involved communication through slack rather than other private forms of communication. We had begun to use texting a form of communication but quickly changed to slack to ensure that everything was able to be pulled up easier in the future for documentation and blogs. We learned to better troubleshoot using sites such as stackoverflow and GitHub to find information on node as well as npm versions. The start of our first sprint consisted of working on the front end of the project to make sure it was able to run and look into the server side as well to gain more information on how it worked. We had many problems when trying to make the ng2-amrs repository to work when we cloned them on to our own computers. We consulted each other and the various other teams to understand the common problems everyone was having and fix them together. After cloning the proper files onto our computers, we immediate ran into problems when trying to run the project. We were met with various errors that we were able to fix by updating our versions of npm and nodeJS. The npm version was easy to update through commands in the terminal but various team members were having issues with updating node through the terminal, so a manual reinstallation was necessary. During the installation, we found that we must check a box that allowed node to install packages that may be needed as a project is built to ensure that the project could continue to compile. After this error, I happened to get a windows x64 compatibility error for certain files within the project, specifically a file named style.scss. Fortunately, our professor was able to locate a solution to the error and explained that we should type the command “npm rebuild node-sass” to rebuild that node so that it would work with our version of windows. After trying to build the project once more, we ran into another error when running the command “ng build –prod” which would have let us build the project and figure out any other errors we were having. The error said that the javascript process ran out of memory which seemed quite odd. Our teammate Harry was able to troubleshoot this error from stackoverflow using google and emailing people from AMPATH. We were able to change some of the memory restrictions on the javascript process and ran the command npm start which allowed us to fully compile the project and get an interface running. We currently are still facing issues because the project says that it was compiled with warnings which we have not delved into yet as we are awaiting more information from AMPATH. Our troubleshooting methods were mainly using our resources from the internet to find out why the project was running into issues until we were able to properly compile it into a workable interface.

References:

Node JS manual update

https://nodejs.org/en/

Style.scss error

https://github.com/sass/node-sass/issues/1918

JavaScript out of memory error

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50621043/fatal-error-call-and-retry-last-allocation-failed-javascript-heap-out-of-memo

From the blog CS@Worcester – Student To Scholar by kumarcomputerscience and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Over the past two weeks, I experienced my first sprint with my fellow teammates. Although it was introductory in nature (as were the tasks we actually completed), I feel that it gave me a solid understanding of what to expect in the upcoming months, and in my eventual career.

The first sprint consisted almost entirely of setup tasks; each member of the team installed Webstorm, connected to AMPATH’s test server, familiarized ourselves with JIRA, set up a Trello board, among several other things. The bulk of our communication throughout each of these tasks consisted of troubleshooting, particularly when trying to get the ng-amrs build working properly on our machines. There were a few different fixes we came to, but in general, it seemed that each of us was having the issue of a file not being found. We each worked out with each other how to find that specific file, and the build worked fine once we’d each done so. As a result of the fact that we each found different methods of resolution to this, however, we have also agreed as a group that we should exclude these files (which, thankfully, were only styles) from our commits to the project.

A teammate and I each forgot to submit responses for one of the scheduled standup meetings. Fortunately, the reason for this was that it had been such an insignificant period of time due to the prior completion of tasks, and nothing of value was left out of any report.

In future sprints, I believe that the familiarity that this preliminary sprint provided our team as a whole will serve us well. Having already discussed the user stories provided by AMPATH with the others, I am excited to get to work on this application. For me, and for the other members of the group to my knowledge, this is the first product I’ll be putting into the real world. Although the idea of this being my first work to have real consequence is daunting, I believe that we as a team will be able to deliver not only a satisfactory final product, but one which exceeds expectation. If we can keep up the kind of groove we had going for these two weeks, it might even be a smooth project – imagine that.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Studio H by Connor V. and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

During the first sprint, I learned more about the node modules and dependencies needed for the AMPATH application to load properly, mainly the angular2-ladda module. I learned more about angular and angular testing, including framworks such as Jasmine and Karma. I learned about test debugging right from the browser. I learned how to create a Github organization, a useful tool for any team of developers.

Our team worked well together, I believe we all have the skills needed to take on the task of adding offline functionality for the AMPATH providers. I created the Github organization for our team, and made sure that my team members were on the same page. We organized how the team should manage pull requests and for now will be approving requests when we meet. I think we will have more communication when we actually start writing code and making changes.

The first week, I forked the ng2-amrs repository from the class organization to our team organization. All team members were added so they were able to fork their own copies to work on. From then, my team members and I worked on installing the needed dependencies for the application to compile. From the start everyone had compilation errors because some files were missing or in a different directory. While browsing the Slack channel we discovered that a different team member(Matt) posted a fix to the issue we were all having. The issue was with the angular2-ladda module, the errors showed that we had some missing files. Our team followed the instructions on what changes needed to be made and successfully fixed the errors. Once we had the application compiling properly, we set up our browsers with the help of the AMPATH team’s youtube video showing us how to add the CORS plugin. Once logged in we realized there was no data being shown as the AMPATH team is still working on getting dummy patient data on the test severs.

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From the blog CS@Worcester – code friendly by erik and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

From the blog CS@Worcester – BenLag's Blog by benlagblog and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.