CST 438 - Week 7

Final Project

In this final week, we were still working on our project. We were building a RESTful API using Spring Boot that supports an issue ticketing system. There were three services, a front-end web service, and two back-end services that supported the tickets and the users of our application. We split up the services evenly between the three of us, and I took responsibility for the ticketing service. This service needed to handle the tickets and the messages associated with each ticket. 

I finished my service around the end of week 6 with little more work to do. I had my code passing all junit tests and confirmed all of my routes were working. Once my other teammates submitted their services and tested it with mine, almost nothing worked. I spent the next 6-7 days trying to debug my service with no success. This unfortunately also delayed the web service from making progress, because a successful connection could only be made with *one* of the routes in my REST controller (not a very effective application). 

It was not until we were able to schedule a pair programming session over Zoom that we were able to debug the service. It proved to be a few very simple fixes involving: changing the stored data type in our mySQL database from an enum to text for the "Statuses" of tickets, changing the variable name of the "id"s in my Ticket and Ticket Message Java objects, and storing my returned JSON objects in a different data structure. 

So the fixes were less of an issue than the delays they caused. Because of the lost time spent tracking down these issues, I was not able to implement as many of the features as I wanted or create a more robust testing suite. If I had another chance to do this project, I would have reached out to my team earlier instead of trying to find the cause of these issues myself.