Dorm Energy Simulation Milestone

This week marks the end of the milestone for the Dorm Simulation Group. Joining a group already in progress has presented some difficulties. Alan and Edwin have already been working on this project for the entire semester so they had a good understanding of the system. Being that the interaction between all of the different parts between the meters and sensors and WattDepot is complicated, it took me a few times to actually figure out how all of the pieces fit together.

Working together to create this system has been just as complicated. We separated out the parts with Alan working on the meter simulation, Alan working on the sensors, and me and Bao working on the dorm simulation. The way we were working was we each worked on our own parts and then put them together. We ran into many issues with data types and multiple conversions required to make them work with the requirements of the libraries we were using. It didn't help that we only integrated svn in the final week of the project. This resulted in many checkstyle and pmd errors which needed to be fixed at the end.



The postponing of all of these essential software engineering practices has made it much more work in the last week of the project. It has been clear as to why these sytems should be in place in the very beginning and the benefits of doing so have become painfully clear while working on this project.