Week 8 – Month 2 – End of Phase 2

Phase 1. Phase 2. Ends of an era. We are coming to a close to Phase 2. We are polishing things up as we close out our Alpha phase and go into our Early Beta phase. This is an exciting time for us since we will now be able to get feedback from the public! Which is an amazing thing. We will be able to get some insight about our app that will be vital to our success! What is that saying, something about getting a fresh pair of eyes on it to see what you have missed. . . Well, whatever it is, it holds extremely true. I know from firsthand that it takes a new pair of eyes to see something that has been missed!

Closing out: Dotting the “T”s and Crossing the “I”s

As we finishing up this checkpoint in our code, we are finalizing all of our MPV features. Ensuring that they are functioning as designed, has the brain power behind it, and in a place where we can enhance it further without having to change much of anything. And that statement is KEY! We want the core, the bones of it, to stay the same as we spit and polish it. We want to be able to give it LIFE. Something that not only we will be proud of, but something the public will be interested in. Oh, and don’t worry, I am sure you will enjoy it just as much as we do! Unless you hate the colors blue, purple, white, black, green, orange, red, and all the difference varieties of those colors.

No-code: Wait, no coding???

This week, I will say that I did a lot of housekeeping items. Updated our Jira board, updated our Shared Folder, and even ensured that we had good backups of both our source code and database. Yes, just because we are using GitHub to save and store our code, doesn’t always mean it will be 100% secure. There could be a day where I update a piece of code, not realizing that it plays a vital role in one of my team members code and BAM!!! That doesn’t work and mine stops working as well when they try to fix it. Then we are in a back-and-forth battle of restoring from Git versions. Also, just in case we want to roll back to a good restore point.

But I will say that I did do SOME coding. I helped fix some bugs that I noticed in some of my charts and UI design. Thankfully, it wasn’t that hard to get completed. Also, made some changes to another page to help make it look “cleaner”.

Next Steps: Beta Phase

It’s time for BETA! It has been a long road getting to this point. A lot of trial and error. Coding working and then not working. UI changing because you changed a pixel size by one (stares at Microsoft Word). All of these headaches. All of these interesting feats and features. It all comes down to this. . . public testing! Or in this case, very select few testing. We will be reaching out to some friends and family that we know will assist us in giving us the most feedback as possible. Holding nothing back. Being aggressive (without actually making us cry 🙂 ). But don’t worry! Eventually we will open it up to everyone to test. But right now, are testing has to be very careful since the data we are using is super-secret!

Coolz! 1 and 2 complete! 3, 4, and 5 is all that remains! Super excited to get to these final phases as we will be plunging into getting user feedback and polishing what we have. We will also be adding in some more features to tag along with the core features. Just like amending a law! Next week, we will be taking a break since we will be in our school’s summer vacation. So, there will not be a post next week unless I do some type of “history” post or something to help fill the gap. Till then!

-Timmy