Week 3

What happened this week

In week 3 we have set up our first page with real push functionality. So if data was written in the database the new elements showed up on the Dashboard without reloading the site. This is a crucial step for us, because this life function is one of the major requirements for our dashboard. This also showed us, how the layers interact with each other and we now understand the whole ecosystem a lot better.

On the weekly status meeting with Swisscom we were able to discuss the final requirements in detail. This helped us a lot in our further planning of the development. Additionally we got VPN access into the Swisscom network. This allows us to access the current version of the Swisscom qFactory.

Core issues

Further we had to redesign our server build. The first structure did not match all the requirements so the complete structure had to be redone. The issue was that the first version just focused on fetching data but didn't take a look on how to post data back to the database. And on top of that, we didn't take a look on how we map different endpoints. So we would have needed a lot more code on the client side without creating functionality. We needed a way to collect responses and send them to a single endpoint. We tried to implement another layer on top of the qDashboard server so that we didn't have to change any of the existing code. We finally achieved that really good and we're now able to get better response objects in the client application. Any request to the qDashboard server now is able to define to which endpoint the answer should go which makes it much more easier for the client to handle a lot of different responses.

What are we doing next?

Now that we have a qDashboard server, a prototyped client and a full overview of the functionality and the improvements the Swisscom needs compared to the existing dashboard, we are able to focus on implementing functionality. We are going to create a list of user stories using the online tool the Swisscom showed us (Trello, a tool for managing kanban/agile projects) and we're going to start with the implementation.

Our System archictecure:

Image of the Bootstrap template we use: