This week's accomplishment included a finished Stoplight Gadget version 1.0 and a project hosting site called Stoplight Gadget. Version 1.0 is just our starting point for the whole project which is mostly about setting up the requirements and getting a feel of the basic functions. Our group meeting with Prof. Johnson has been the most significant part of this and last week's work. The meeting clarified all the gray areas about this project. First, we learned that our stoplight is supposed to be a general stoplight that people can download and use with relative ease. We initially thought that our stoplight is about Wattdepot and therefore constrained by it's functions; A stoplight that bear some similarity with last semester's Oscar WebApp. We learned that our stoplight gadget is supposed to work with any data, something that users can add to their iGoogle page and be used for different data by entering their own threshold and data source. During our meeting, we also outlined the various functions and requirements for each version that we need to produce. We decided to create the basic functions first and then expand from there on. For version 1.0's visualization aspect, our gadget displays an integer that was taken from a hard coded source, which is from google spreadsheet. From that basic function we turned it into a gadget. Our next assignment is to add more functionality such as an actual stoplight image, a hard coded threshold, user inputted data source and the accompanying user interface.
An important lesson I learned from the first two weeks of working on this project is that a clear and concise instruction on what the project is about is a very important feature of software development. It helps developers to easily plan an outline of how the project is to grow. Extensive and periodic group meetings is also an important part software development in order to fix problems that arise during development period and to keep the group heading to one direction.
