Blog Post 7

Hello again!

This week’s blog post was supposed to be special. I was going to write it in Bulgarian. Unfortunately, Ubuntu is being funny and not allowing me to use the cyrillic alphabet. Next week I guess!

Last week I thought I was almost done with Sprint 1. I was wrong and it took me until Thursday to do it. 🙁 Still better than the expected which was the end of Friday!

Czech out my progress at this link if it works

University Bootstrap Template

Last week I started using the University Official Bootstrap University Branding Template. At first I was finding it hard to fit my design ideas into the style of the template, but after a lot of effort I managed to make things look presentable. Since last week I’ve made a bunch of improvements and some new pages.

The pages I’ve made are the following:

• Login
• Home
• My modules
• View module
• View question
• My unanswered questions
• My answered questions
• Ask a question
• Universal HTTP error page

Bugs

This week I discovered a bunch of bugs and had to treat them. Yuck! At least they’re out of the way now.

The Wonders of Test-Driven Development

Ever since last week when structure was established into my project, I’ve been following the principles of test-driven development. I’ve noticed the following things:

• It can save a ton of time
• It can be frustrating
  • When you’re a noob and you don’t know how things will work, how do you know what the test should do?
  • PHPUnit doesn’t spit out any error messages so it’s annoying to debug tests
  • Tests are boring
• However TDD is still the way to go for sensible reasons

I’ve had 1 persistent issue with my testing: it deletes the live database every time. I understand there is a way to configure it so that the tests have their own database. I tried doing that but suddenly half my tests were failing for no reason. Oh well! One day I might try again.

Current level of functionality

Things the system can currently do include the following:

• Student can ask a question
• Lecturer can answer a question & choose whether to make it public
• Student can see all their own questions & all other public questions
• Lecturer can see all the questions on their module
• Students can like & unlike questions
• Students & lecturers can see how many likes a question has

Screenshot Dump

Weekly screenshots!!