Journal

1st week

We have had our first meeting with Prasad Challagandla and Torsten Boettjer from Swisscom and learned about the project scope and its goals. Further, We have got to know Swisscom's development process in a nutshell and started to look into automated communication tools. After that, we were advised to learn about new technologies and tools which might be used to implement the web-service (such as Node.js, MongoDB, Cloudfoundry).

2nd week

The first assignment in our second week was to be present at the Monday morning meeting at Menlo Park, where we (incl. our project) were introduced to some of Swisscom's partners.

Piston, whose representative was present at the meeting, quickly explained to us their development and ticketing process as well as the tools they are using for their project tracking. This way, we were able to start with our API analysis of ZenDesk and PivotalTracker.

We also managed to write our first push functions with which we were able to automatically push a ticket from our NOSQL data storage into the two systems mentioned above. Further we have decided on a first common schema draft used for all the tickets. We also managed to trigger urls, so that we were able to pull information out of the target system whenever one of our tickets was updated. Moreover the main tasks have been divided upon us by the end of week #4:

  • Kevin is taking care of a Web GUI showing the transactions and the whole cloud infrastructure.

  • Gordian is responsible for the storage and transaction daemons.

  • Cedric is taking care of the push & pull adapters and the format conversions.

Over the weekend we moved our application to the Swisscom developer environment. From now on our application is hosted in a private Swisscom cloud.

3rd week

In a meeting with our project owner we decided to focus on a pilot application with one adapter to ZenDesk. The goal is to design the application very flexible so in the future it will be easy to extend with more adapters to other tools by some other teams.

On Wednesday we finished a first version of the ZenDesk adapter. For now we are offering the creation of new tickets and updating existing tickets. Currently we are focusing on a registration process for the partners and a compact web frontend to monitor the existing tickets.

4th week

We have discussed our software architecture with our technical project contact person and have received a first feedback for the big picture of our project. It showed that we are on track and are working towards a good result. We have also started looking at Trello's API and started to develop an adapter for it.

Furthermore, we have received more feedback from Swisscom's partners regarding their processes and project management/monitoring systems. These insights allowed us to pick up on documenting the interaction between Swisscom and the vendors when a ticket is created.

5th week

This week we had our third meeting with one of Swisscom's partners (ServiceMesh) to discuss their development process. After this meeting we created BPMN process flows for each partner and its interaction with the Swisscom development process. We sent these diagrams to the partners for confirmation of our understanding of their process and have received almost immediate response.

Additionally, we continued to work on our prototype. The backend component is now completely decoupled from the rest of the prototype. We implemented a REST API for the backend to communicate with the two other components of our prototype. Now it is possible to start the backend in an own container and we can easily start multiple instances of this container.

6th week

In our final week, we finished up our project. Our GUI component has experienced a major change as it now runs as a single nginx-container consisting a Bootstrap template on Cloud Foundry. Furthermore, we have implemented a SMS handler into our exchange component, which is calling the Swisscom SMS API to send incoming tickets to subscribed users' phones. We have neatly commented out our code, put our repository on GitHub and have had a final meeting with our main contact Prasad where we showed him the prototype as well as our project documentation.