February

Feb 2 - 8

After having the code for the project in my computer, I started familiarizing myself to the code. Not an easy task, since there is a lot of work that has been done previously and I had never worked with such a project before. It was really interesting to see applied in something running everything that I have learned in the classroom. During this week, I started running Mechanix and going through some of the set of problems that were available in order to understand how it works from the console, so that I could better understand the code and how it is organized.

Feb 9 - 15

At the end of last week, I was assigned to do some testing along with Alyssa, who has been contributing to Mechanix for the past couple of semesters. Our goal was to start some kind of testing system and maybe set up a more formal way of reporting bugs. During this week, the team's focus was to fix as many bugs as possible, since testing sessions with around the corner. We set up two Google docs, one is a Testing Document guide for future testing reference. We give detailed instructions of specific aspects of the program that need to be tested and the procedure that the tester should follow. The other document was a log, of what instances of testing each one of us was doing. The bugs we would find, we would add them to bug list that was previously set up so that everyone would be aware of what needed to be done.

Feb 16 - 22

This week we had a couple of testing sessions with ME students. I volunteered to be present during the session to help out students as well as noting any problems and bugs that they would face. One of the main problems that we had was the server going down when all students were working, and the program would just freeze, once the server was up, students were more likely to loose their work. This caused some frustration on students... It was a good experience to participate in the session since I got to learn and reflect on the process that it takes for a software to be ready for publication. I mean, the team has worked for quiet some time in this project, and it seems like it is a lot, but once you present it to students, they just see what is not working... It was a good lesson for me to learn.

Feb 23 - March 1

During this week I prepared for hosting a testing session with ME students on my own. No one else was going to be able to make it, so I had to prepare to know what to do in case something went wrong. The most important thing was know how to bring the server back up if something happened, and know how to answer to students' questions. The session went fine, the server did not give trouble until almost the end, but I was able to bring it back up. I was really nervous at first, since I have only participated with the project for a couple of weeks, but it went great.