Author: carlosmartell97

Another Week, Another Milestone

--Originally published at TC3045 Software Quality and Testing

Hi again.


Wow, I don’t feel at all like it’s week 3 already, but I guess it’s true. I like where our project is going so
far, we made some progress last week, and I expect this week to be no different.


My personal goal for this week is for some sensor signals from the Raspberry to be sent to our
database, so this data can later be fetched and presented to the user. Of course, this will all depend
on our back-end infrastructure to be available to listen to these signals. But I think we can make it.
From here on, all of our work might start to get more and more entangled, influencing and acting on
each other. And as this happens, we also have to keep an eye on our tests, so we don’t branch off
somehow.


I look forward to this week, do you?

No Casualties So Far

--Originally published at TC3045 Software Quality and Testing

Hello, you. Yes, you.


With week 2 behind us, we’ll all now reflect upon what we were supposed to do for our respective
projects on these past 168 hours. In my case, I made it my goal to understand the Raspberry Pi
signals and have a basic setup in place for the sensors platform. And I’m happy to say I did!
During this week, I was able to understand the basics for using a Raspberry Pi and work with a
temperature sensor with Python.


I also made some research regarding our project and what we’re trying to accomplish. It seems that
remote garden monitoring is not as unheard of as I (we) thought. There are at least a few options
out there that are somehow similar to what we’re trying to do. This helped us understand better what
people are actually looking for to monitor in their own garden/greenhouse setups, and figure out
what will differentiate us from them. There’s even a tree in Germany that constantly tweets updates
about its size and overall health, how cool is that?




In case we wanted to do something twitter-connected, I also found out how to tweet with Python
(which wasn't that complicated at all).


I look forward to week 3, for which I’ll make a post tomorrow.

Until then, sayonara!

Week 2, Bring It On

--Originally published at TC3045 Software Quality and Testing

Week 2 has come, and with that, our plans for it should too. Every week, we’ll be posting what we have
planned to do for our project during that week. In little sprints, we’ll have small milestones that later,
when the week is over, we’ll look back and reflect upon what we had planned.


And this week, I’m going to be involved on delivering a basic foundation for what we’ll need to do with
the Raspberry Pi sensors. I’ll work on understanding this signals and having a basic setup in place.
Next week, we will build on top of this and continue on and on with our project. Or at least that’s the
plan.


This reminds me of a quote from Leonard Snart that goes:
"Make the plan. Execute the plan. Expect the plan to go off the rails. Throw away the plan."
image obtained from http://cdn1.sciencefiction.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Captain-Cold.png


Of course, it shouldn’t have to come to that. We’ll see how well we can stick to our plan.

Stay put for further updates.

Our Project, Looking Ahead…

--Originally published at TC3045 Software Quality and Testing

Hi again. So, if you read my previous in this space you might know by now what I’m going to talk
about. Our final delivery, a project. If you want to read my previous post, I invite you to do so here.


We have the freedom to choose the project we’ll be working on, as long as Ken approves it.We got
into teams, and after talking about it for a while, we decided to work on a greenhouse project where
you can monitor the conditions for your plant(s) remotely and track changes through time. We plan
to do this with the help of a Raspberry Pi and a back-end infrastructure that allows you to check on
the data collected by the Raspberry Pi sensors. Our name? Berry House. It’s a cool name, right?
You can see a live progress of it all on Github. We'll also keep track of our milestones and upcoming
issues there.




I’m personally very interested in this project, not only because I like the idea of technology involved
in aspects of greenhouse (as this project), but on a bigger scale, technology making an impact on
the way humans influence nature; using it as a tool for bigger change. For example, this and this. That just
lows my mind away...


So, yes. We’ll apply the knowledge we gain along the semester to this project, and with an agile
methodology, we’ll iterate and work in sprints. We’ll deliver project milestones and make our way to
our “final” delivery.


As always, if you want more updates, sit tight. More posts to come.



Pre-Mortem…

--Originally published at TC3045 Software Quality and Testing

Hey there! This semester I’m going to be taking a class on software quality and testing with
professor Ken Bauer, for which I will be posting updates in written blog format. I once took
another class with him (a class on Software Engineering), for which you can see all my
blogs here. My final review on that course can be seen here.


If you read any of the previous links, it can be noticed that Ken’s teaching method is not
ordinary. And this semester is not going to be the exception, we’ll still be taking a
flipped-learning approach but with a few changes.
Attendance, for example. Previously, there used to be no attendance. Being physically present
in class was optional, it was up to everyone of us how we divided our workload and our times.
Now, attendance will be closer to ordinary. Our final course grade will depend on meeting the
necessary requirements for a certain grade. For example, if we think we deserve a 95/100
grade, we'll have to prove we meet all necessary requirements for that grade.




We’ll also going to be working on a project as our final delivery. Actually, my next post will be
about exactly that. But for now, I can only say I expect for this semester to be a very productive
one. I find this flipped learning style to be an interesting approach for this particular course,
and I think if done appropriately, we can certainly reach our goals.

So, if you want to keep track of all we’ll be doing, I’ll be posting blogs as the semester goes by!
Stay put.