For the past couple of weeks I've been working on a group project expanding on the WattDepot service that, if you recall from my previous blog posts, collects electricity data from meters and stores it in a database. This allows other tools to retrieve the data for visualization and analysis.
Our group created a command line interface program to help understand various aspects of energy use in the Hale Aloha residence halls at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The user can call different commands and retrieve energy data with output that is easy to read and nicely formatted.
Furthermore, our program is modular and uses a reflection-based command manager that allows for new commands to be added easily to the system. Because the command manager scans for commands upon execution and does not hold a static list of the commands, no further changes to the code need to be done for new commands other than the command implementation itself.
This was my first experience with issue-based project management and working with a group using tools like subversion and google project hosting. Overall it was a really positive experience, and I know I will use the skills I learned in the future when building software in a group environment. My group members communicated effectively and I believe the quality of our software is pretty good. We implemented all of the required functionality as well as the reflection-based command manager which was not required, but offered for extra credit (Thanks Toy!).
Overall this project was a positive experience and one of the better group projects I've been a part of, simply for the fact that communication was not a problem. I've had my fair share of bad group projects where communication is a problem, and they can be pretty painful experiences. Thankfully were we able to work together effectively and communicated to each other at each step of the way.
Project site: hale-aloha-cli-tnt
You can download a release of the program from our hosting site here.
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