15.MyISERN-1.0

Group Ivory distribution available
HERE

Group Ivory Team: Shaoxuan Zhang, Ben Karsin


Lessons about JAXB:
The example given to us for this project was a great help. It provided many of the necessary functionality of JAXB. Without the example to show us the many complicated classes and methods of JAXB, this project would have been extremely difficult.
While adapting the sample code to meet our project, however, I learned quite a lot about JAXB.


XML
I was able to quickly understand the structure of the XML documents. I was expecting them to be much more complicated. Once we understood the structure of the documents and what needed to be done with them, we were able to work on the rather tedious task of creating the structure and implementation of this project.


Major Issues
One of the major issues we had was creating a nice table format. There was no specification in the assignment for a desired format, so I spent quite a bit of time trying to come up with an optimal solution. I turned out, however, that my partner was able to design a very nice looking table that is able to work well with different sizes and numbers of entries.
During this project both my teammate and I because quite frustrated with findbugs. Some of the errors given were unnecessary, annoying to overcome. For example, it tends to complain about
if (a != b) {
...
}
else {
...
}

This is really an insignificant problem but can become quite annoying. We also had some rather annoying little problems with javadocs giving errors if package.html is not of an exact format.
Overall, the majority of the issues we faced were not very large, but added up to be quite an annoyance. We eventually overcame them all and have a quite nice and stable project.


Teamwork
On the first day after the project was assigned, we decided to meet at the library. Upon meeting, however, we decided that it was an unnecessary waste of time to meet every day in person, so we decided to just use email, phone, and Skype to communicate regularly. The technology helped us communicate, but the project is fundamentally difficult to divide. We both began by reading the given documentation and tutorials, and began designing separately. Shaoxuan came up with a working program before me, so we decided to use his. He completed the design and implementation of the core of the project, while I was responsible for the testing, documentation, and other various small tasks needed to finish the project.
In the future, I think we should schedule specific IM or Skype meetings at a specific time each day, as the delay of email can be inefficient. I hope that future projects are more divisible and we are able to partition the work. We ended up getting the task done rather well, but I think if we were able to better divide the work, our time would have been used much more efficiently.