Roommate App Development Blog » Goals http://development.roommateapp.com Building a bill manager, and some other stuff Tue, 16 Jun 2009 05:24:13 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8 en hourly 1 Testing Roommate App http://development.roommateapp.com/2009/06/testing-roommate-app/ http://development.roommateapp.com/2009/06/testing-roommate-app/#comments Tue, 16 Jun 2009 05:18:21 +0000 Heff http://development.roommateapp.com/?p=53 It’s been over a month now since launching Roommate App, and for not advertising and not having any kind of marketing website, it’s doing pretty well. I’ve been getting a lot of good feedback/requests as well. I kind of burnt myself out a little on the project getting it launched, so I took some time off, but I will get to everything eventually. Before I get too deep into new features though, I need to develop the test suite.

Coming from a PHP background, testing is new ground for me (not that testing isn’t done in PHP, but it’s not nearly as prevalent as in the Rails community). When I say “test” in this context, I don’t mean clicking around through the app in your web browser and making sure all the links work, etc. I mean writing more code that makes sure the code you’ve written works (sounds like an endless cycle doesn’t it?). The benefit of doing this is that you can make changes to your application, then run all your tests to make sure what you just changed didn’t break something somewhere else. I’m probably not explaining it very well. Judging by the Wikipedia article, I guess you would call this “Regression Testing”.

Anyway, at this point Roommate App has very low test coverage. The goal would be to reach 100% test coverage, and it’s probably under 5% right now. So I’ve got some work to do. The testing guide at rubyonrails.org was a good starting place for me. It gave me a good overview of the basics and the reasoning behind it. If anyone knows additional resources feel free to suggest them.

While the guide was a good start, Sevenwire (my company) actually uses a lot of modifications to the default Rails app test suite. These include:

  • Factory Girl — A library for creating test data.
  • Shoulda — A library for writing more understandable tests.
  • Forgery — A fake/random data generator (and a Sevenwire original).

So I have a lot of different elements to learn, but that’s half the fun of this project.

]]> http://development.roommateapp.com/2009/06/testing-roommate-app/feed/ 3 Progress! http://development.roommateapp.com/2009/02/progress/ http://development.roommateapp.com/2009/02/progress/#comments Mon, 16 Feb 2009 06:46:25 +0000 Heff http://development.roommateapp.com/?p=24 Got a lot done this evening. Redesigned the dashboard and roommate views and did the html/css for both. Also got bill splitting and payments sending out confirmation emails.

That covered a good chunk of my to-do lists, so moving along steadily towards my new goals and launch date of April 1.

I have way too many ideas for this app, and the hardest part is staying focused on just getting the essentials done so I can launch it.

]]> http://development.roommateapp.com/2009/02/progress/feed/ 0 New Deadlines http://development.roommateapp.com/2009/02/new-deadlines/ http://development.roommateapp.com/2009/02/new-deadlines/#comments Sat, 07 Feb 2009 07:05:07 +0000 Heff http://development.roommateapp.com/?p=22 Yeah, I know this is getting old, but I’ve got some new goals. I’ve been side tracked by some other projects, including Bryan Clay’s website, but I’m sticking to these this time…really.

Launch by April 1. Online payments by May 15.

The second could be a lofty goal, but we’ll see. Brandon set up a Basecamp project on the Sevenwire account for Roommate App, so now I get to go load it up with milestones and to-dos. 

My problem so far I think is that I’ve been letting my self get overwhelmed. I had a list of everything that needed to be done, and some overall deadlines. What I need to do is divide and conquer, setting deadlines for each piece. I think that’ll help.

]]> http://development.roommateapp.com/2009/02/new-deadlines/feed/ 0 The Beginning of the Middle http://development.roommateapp.com/2008/08/the-beginning-of-the-middle/ http://development.roommateapp.com/2008/08/the-beginning-of-the-middle/#comments Mon, 11 Aug 2008 06:12:31 +0000 Heff http://development.roommateapp.com/?p=4 This blog is where I’ll track the development of RoommateApp, a project that I started over two years ago and has gone through many revisions and name changes, as well as any key learnings about web application development and marketing I gain along the way. 
After becoming a partner/designer in a Ruby on Rails based web app shop, I’ve decided to scrap PHP and completely rebuild RoommateApp in Rails. I just started learning Rails and this will be my first project using it. I decided to make the switch partly because learning is a major motivator for me, and will help keep the momentum of this project going, and also because my co-workers give me crap whenever I mention PHP.
So I should probably make my goals public, so I feel accountable even if nobody ever reads this blog. Here goes.
  • Launch public beta of bill management portion by the end of August.
  • Implement Amazon FPS (credit card payents) by the end of October. 
  • Implement chore management by the end of 2008. 
  • 20 active homes by the end of 2008.
In 2009 I’ll start to turn on the promotion engine. I’d like to give it a little time for polishing before pushing it.
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