Screenshot of Customer Details screen

 

8th March 2008

Product Purchase almost complete.
Connected the live quotes system to the flex front end, had to update the flex with the new fields and process. DM Office is sent an email with all the client and quote details once a client confirms.

Need to add printable pdf with client details filled in for him to post to client, returned and sent to insurance company. Also need to send email with
DM’s regulatory requirements, such as declaration of commission etc.

Got some good answers to a few requirements questions from DM last night, regards some terminology surrounding the requesting and responses of quotes.

The process works quite nicely, will focus on the UI aspect of this process and then replicate it across the front end. We’ve put the component into the management system side too, so that DM can quickly generate quotes for clients on the phone or in the office.

 

25th February 2008

Got the XML communication link with bestadvice working, with a test account given to us this morning. Have asked for some clarification on some of the fields and then can get on to testing and error handling etc.

After that I began work on the Shop Front editing Rich Text Editors, by storing the page details in the database and creating requestHandlers to retrieve and persist changes. Considering some primitive version control, or at least a “Revert” function in the editor.

 

14th Feb 2008 Meeting 13 with Howard

Today was our first meeting with Howard since before Christmas, our last meeting was a day before delivery of the CMS prototype to DM. Similarly today’s meeting is on the eve of our first release delivery to DM.

Our agenda was as follows:

1. Blog Review
2. Bug Tracking
3. Source Control
4. Hallway Testing
5. DM05
6. Initial Release Review

First off, we had our regular blog review (not too many updates during exam time!) , followed by a demo of our ASP.net Bug Tracking setup that Kevin got up and running on his machine this week – screenshot of issue tracker.

We then discussed our Source control solution, which fast became necessary now that we have started full production development. We have chosen ’subversion’ and its associated eclipse plugin ’subclipse’. It allows for comparisons between versions of files, stored in a repository, making it very easy to get back to working code when you’re 1 undo too far away!

The notion of hallway testing is taken from Joel’s 12 Steps to Better Software, and involves grabbing someone in the hallway (or CA lab) to randomly test the code you’ve just written for usability.

We also demonstrated Release 1, which consists of our replacement customer database GUI: Filters for searching for customers and an interface for inputting new customers’ data.

 

9th Feb 2008

Spent today finalizing the Customer Database interface for OBS, its nearly completely
wrapped up. Adding new customers, updating existing ones and deleting (marking as
inactive). The flex UI sends a newCustomerDetails request with either a brand new customer
or updated customer details, the newCustomerDetailsRequestHandler determines which it is,
and persists the changes to the database.

Some learning curves today included using a WHERE clause with a hibernate select, deciding
how to deduce whether a customer was new or an update, without relying on information from
flex (Did this using whether or not a clientid was in use), how best to use multiple
constraints.

Flex was sending back the string ‘null’ which was being persisted to the database, rather
than the value null, I overcame this by inserting a simple check on each entry received from flex.

Validation layer will add more concrete assurance to this.

 

Back to work..

It’s been a long time since we worked on the OBS, but now that the exams are out of the way
it’s full steam ahead to get each production phase delivered as per the schedule. First up
it’s a working subset of the Management System, as Dermot needs to view his customers,
which we have exported from his previous MS Access database system.