ICS 499: Beta versions always have problems

This past week marked the climax peak of the mountain for the Devcathlon development team. We accomplished a majority of the Devcathlon system, from creating a team to a full functional scoreboard. We presented our accomplishment to our professor, Prof. Johnson, and got his approval for a test run.


Following the presentation, the class discussed of what steps to take next. As class leader I proposed the same idea Prof. Johnson had; which was to fix some last minute detailing and have him upload the system to the test server. Later once the Devcathlon is up and running, test some of the functionalities. The class all agreed to the proposal of the next step and also agreed to begin writing the developer and user wiki documentations for the Devcathlon Project Page.


When I received an email from Prof. Johnson that Devcathlon was installed and running; I immediately precede to the test website (Devcathlon Test Server). I quickly logged in and created a team, then waited till the next for the other members of the class to log in and join a team. Once everyone was settled with logging in and there was two teams in the system; I next tried to create a match and “BANG” nothing happened. Of all parts of the system not to function, my part, the creation of matches between teams.


Trying to narrow down the problem was kind of hard with out any console output. I then emailed the professor requesting him to send me what the program was printing out to the console on the server. In his reply, the console output printed that there was an invalid value for the hour field. I had a feeling that it might be the date inputs, due to how I wrote the method to handle those inputs. I wanted the user not have to worry about inputting anything other than a date, month, and a year. The crazy thing is that we, the Devcathlon Development Team, are able to create matches on our local machines.


Over the past few days I rewrote the method that handles the input dates; not to pass in a static 24 hour, but to use the hour the user creates the match. Hopefully that will solve that problem, and no other functional problems will occur down the line. These things are expected to happen, since Devcathlon is still in its beta phase.