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Live Contest Blog
Hello everybody,
the results of the evaluation of the Plat_Forms 2007 contest have now been published.
Find a summary (recommended!), a short presentation, and the lengthy full report (recommended!) on page Results.
Feel free to discuss contest, report and results in the comments part of this blog entry. No registration is required.
Lutz Prechelt
For our colleagues in Geneva, but also for you bloggers, we have put together a report on what happened within team1 during the contest.
The abaXX Team likes to thank the organizers and the other participients. The task was really interesting and the preparation was very good. We have enjoyed pariticipating in this contest and are eagerly waiting for the results.
See you in 2009
Bernhard Moser
Dirk Feufel
Harald Gliebe
Alvar Freude, the Perl platform representative, who was present throughout the contest, found that most teams looked "typical" for what he would expect a team using that platform to look like.
To see whether this is really true (and to pass his idle time), he prepared a set of photos of each team (and even their flipchart) in the following way:
- Alvar has removed telltale platform signs such as logos and slogans (even the team numbers) from the photographs
- For each set of photos, you can choose via a checkbox what you think is this team's platform
- When submitting such a choice you will be shown what the other visitors believed
- When finished with all teams you can visit a page containing the true answers
A very nice game for all those of you who have not yet studied the team photos further down in the blog too closely (or have already forgotten what they saw).
Have a look at www.a-blast.org/plat_forms.
Thanks, Alvar!
The live phase of the contest is now over.
All nine teams have delivered a solution in time.
Their servers are now down (because they were the teams' own hardware) and so the solutions can currently not be tried out any more. At some point in the future, we may make them available again publicly on an FU Berlin server, but when that will happen depends on how the evaluation progresses (which we do not know yet). In the not-too-distant future we will also put up for public perusal the source code distributions that the teams have put together.
In the meantime, the organizers thank all who have helped the teams by commenting on their public prototypes!
We expect to present the results of the evaluation of the solutions in May (and possibly a few pieces before that time).
[dami from team1]
Nice to be home, after a good night of sleep ... but my head is still partly in Nuremberg, thinking of what went well (quite a lot of things), and what could have been better (a couple of lessons learned). I'll post about those thoughts a bit later ... for the moment, I am trying to focus on the next thing to do, namely refreshing the voice and remembering all my texts for singing Rossini, Schubert and Spohr tonight. So I'm not yet over with stress !
Platforms was a very nice experience, and the given task was quite interesting. For a while we thought we could do it all (over-ambitious as usual!) ... but then a couple of unexpected problems rose and we lost too much time to finish properly : how frustrating !
Thanks again to the organisers for the excellent preparation.
Hi out there!
So, we are now burning the CD...finished everything.
Went quite well, unfortunatelly we found some bugs at the end we could not fix anymore....but it is not so easy to concentrate after 30 hours.
Our statistics:
- Drunk Red Bull: 6 cans
- Slept (totally): 11 hours
- Went to toilette (totally): 22 times
- Lines of Code: No idea!
- Got "D"s (which means we where developing when the supervisers come): "A lot"
Cheers out there!
For all those of you who want to take a real close look at the precise task the participants are trying to solve, here are the three files we gave the participants:
- the requirements document platforms-task.pdf they received both on paper and on CD. It also explains the role of the other two files on the CD, namely
- ttt-questions.txt and
- PbT.wsdl
The requirements describe a task called PbT (People by Temperament), a simple community portal for contacting others based on personality type and other personality-related profile information.
Hi folks,
we updated our preview server continuously the past hours. Now we announce an official public version.
What should work:
- Status Page
- Displaying prviate information if I am in contact with the person or viewing my own status page
- Viewing TTT results and timestamp of public TTT
- With whom I am in contact with, who I sent RCDs and who sent RCDs to me and view their status pages
- Accepting or denying received RCDs (you will not be able to test this since there is no RCD_send method yet)
- Running the "Trivial Temperament Test"
- Results are displayed very minimalistic :)
- Viewing member list with 2-dimensional overview plot
- Note there is a smal bug with the pager
- Searching contacts is NOT working!
Thank you all for your feedback ;)
Here is some information about when the teams as a whole decided to sleep, that is, when none of the team members were in the contest room. The data is a little misleading because some teams left and arrived all at once, while other teams send some members to go sleeping while others continued working. But even the team6 members all had some sleep.
Team absence during the night
| team | begin | end |
|---|---|---|
| 1 (EdG/Optaros, Perl) | 5:00 | 8:00 |
| 2 (plusW, Perl) | 1:00 | 7:00 |
| 3 (abaXX, Java) | 3:30 | 7:00 |
| 4 (Accenture, Java) | 1:00 | 8:30 |
| 5 (RevSys, Perl) | 1:00 | 6:00 |
| 6 (Oxid, PHP) | * | * |
| 7 (Globalpark, PHP) | 1:00 | 7:00 |
| 8 (Zend, PHP) | 2:30 | 8:30 |
| 9 (Innoopract, Java) | 1:00 | 9:30 |
By and large, everybody looked quite acceptable this morning and hardly any loud groans could be heard.
Two teams even report they had several beers together at a bar before they went to bed.
At about 10:00 I went around and asked each team to prepare a rough estimate of what fraction (in percent) of the functional requirements they expect to implement until the end of the contest (15:00), separately by requirements category.
Here are the results:
| team | MUST | SHOULD | MAY |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 (EdG/Optaros, Perl) | 70 | 80 | 65 |
| 2 (plusW, Perl) | 80 | 50 | 33 |
| 3 (abaXX, Java) | 100 | 70 | 50 |
| 4 (Accenture, Java) | 50 | 10 | 10 |
| 5 (RevSys, Perl) | 100 | 100 | 75 |
| 6 (Oxid, PHP) | 80 | 80 | 50 |
| 7 (Globalpark, PHP) | 100 | 20 | 5 |
| 8 (Zend, PHP) | 70 | 20 | 10 |
| 9 (Innoopract, Java) | 20 | 10 | 10 |
Fairly different amounts of confidence...
(Yes, the requirements specification document will be put online some time soon)
Good morning,
We just finished and deployed the SOAP interface to our application. Since we've only done a little testing on this services we are looking for testers and feedback.
WSDL : http://team3.plat-forms.org/wsdlSOAP : http://team3.plat-forms.org/soap
Thanks & happy testing!
your abaXX Team
Team1 has a new release.
Many bug fixes (but still many other to work at).
New form for searching related PbT members.
Enjoy : http://team1.plat-forms.org
Hi,
so finally we took it to. We put one version, we created in the night, for the public preview.
Have a look at http://team3.plat-forms.org/. Pls test and comment!
...and look forward to our next version!
Our physical status: Got some sleep...but not enough!
Cheers!
So we are back to work after about 2 hours sleep ... even such a short break was good to take.
We now will first work on a bugfix release, to be delivered early in the morning. Then we will spend the rest of the day adding as much functionality as we can ... knowing that the 100% target is unreachable until 15:00.
It's not exactly eye candy, but maybe you would still like to know who are our participants? Here we go:
We thought you might want to know. No fancy 360 degree panorama today, but at least these two shots:
As Lutz Prechelt promised , "software engineers tend to be somewhat optimistic when it comes to estimates, that means it will still take a while". But we're running, too!
What is working:
- Registration (with data validation)
- Login
- Logout
- Session management
- A lot in the background ;).
See it live at http://team2.plat-forms.org.
Design issues will come soon, but that's not relevant at the moment.
NOTE: Navigation is just a dummy ;)
Still a nice collection of bugs, and a huge collection of missing features -- but a least a nice new look.
See the latest release of team1 at
http://team1.plat-forms.org
(and thanks for the comments)
Ok we fixed most of the reported bugs and finished the TTT Survey.
Database reseted so please register again for an login an test most as possible.
[Update: 00:50] some small fixes are online ...
Hello folks,
Team1 (Etat de Genève / Optaros) just published their first release. We implemented so far :
- registration and login (including checks about duplicate entries)
- cookie as session id
- management of temperament tests (seeing previous tests - taking a new test).
We didn't focus too much on the look and feel, neither on data validation - be patient, it will improve.
Here is the address : http://team1.plat-forms.org
Right. The EasyBlog module for Plone does not advertise its RSS URLs in any obvious place. Sorry. Here it is: http://www.plat-forms.org/2007/blog/easyblog_rss.
...by not participating in Plat_Forms?
We have a beautiful atmosphere here.
Find below a few impressions of the setting in the contest room and in the rest of the Open Source meets Business conference site.Hoi folks,
as promised we make our first public release. Actually not much is there - just the pages which will be used, login is working, and registering a new user is working. Editing, Saving, etc. everything else is just faked.
