( Thoughts of Dharmil )

A. If I could go back, knowing what I know now, I would probably not have done the 7 week training project, rather get straight in the project. This would help to speed the development process, helping fix lot of bugs already. Currently in our project, we are in an active process of finding and fixing exceptions which is a tedious process and takes up lot of time. If I could have begun earlier, many of the bugs would have fixed. We also had to code up new functions and I believe I could have done them myself giving the benefit of going faster to my team. These changes would accelerate the project progress. My experience would have been better since the more and more errors I fix, the better I become aware of the underlying core. My learning would have been much much more, in that, specially the XSLT part.

B. I have been a PHP/MySQL/Javascript coder for about an year now. I have had experience with those languages before. These skills of mine helped me to get familiar with the project and the Core faster than my other team mates. In the training project, I was mainly the coder, with my other team mates serving other respective roles. In the 2.1 framework project with my skills I was able to code and add different functions to code. I was also able to do a readme type tutorial for XML creation, which my team mates appreciated.

C. From Michael, the team leader, I learnt the XSLT skills, which were very useful. I also learnt how the core works, how to find out some of the functions if I am not sure. I also learnt lot of unix skills, which I think were very useful. From all the members, I also learnt the skill of team work, how it contributes, and how can we get the work done much faster.

D. Personally, the skills of teamwork I learnt will be very useful in working together on some projects with friends. It will also be useful in the professional world. Also most of the skills such as XSLT, documentation, unix will be really useful in my professional field since my major is Computer Science and those skills are very relevant to my field.

E. When working on the training project, we got a roster database from Pam to fix the Course Updater. The database was big, and we had lot of information with us. We had the information of every epics member, include full name, major, college, team etc. What Pam had done is remove confidential information like Student ID. Even without the student ID, we had lot of information in our hands. She asked us to keep the database with ourselves, and not to share it with anyone outside the team. To address the issues, we did as she asked, not share the information with anyone outside the team. If we hadn’t addressed the issues, confidential student information could have been sold, and privacy would have been lost. Everyone’s information was at jeopardy, including ours because it included every student in epics. We also decided to delete the mail and the database once we’re done testing the database and have completed the assignment. That way no one can gain access to it.