Are You My Mountain?

"Beyond the Mountain is Another Mountain" - Haitian Proverb

Taking one out of Ronn's book, I thought I'd open up with a proverb. It's weird though. I always thought that was a Chinese proverb since I've always heard my parents say it. Anyways, it basically means there will always be challenges in life (at least from my interpretation) . There is always something bigger and better than you. You can't conquer them all.

I think the concept sort of applies here. There are always challenges in life, and there are definitely various challenges in Devcathlon. My starter event/challenge, "Best Coverage", is an example of that. The goal is to be the team with the higher coverage, but you anticipate the other team to constantly challenge and overcome your previous percentile.

For those new to the idea of Devcathlon, it is a continuous integration "game" based on Hackystat sensor data. Teams are formed and when a certain pattern of behavior is exhibited in the sensor data, the team is awarded points. At the end of the match, the team with the most points win.

Best Coverage Rules and Specifications

• Wakeup once every 1 day.
  
• Team with the highest coverage is awarded 10 points
• If the same team has the highest coverage for 5 days in a row, award 10 points.
  

Programming Process & Problems

I was fortunate that my event was similar to the example given. I simply read in the match, looped through all the teams and recovered any recent commit records. With those records, I would compare coverage and return the highest team with that data. If the team with the highest coverage is the one specified in the parameters, then award them points. Otherwise, do nothing.

Initially I had the program loop through all the teams and award the team with the highest percentage. But in the event of ties, only one team would be rewarded in my original code. So I modified it. It worked out well because its consistent with all the other compute scoring methods where you have to run the computeScore method once for each team. So I decided to only award the team with points if it has the highest coverage PLUS it is the team specified in the parameters.

Example Pseudocode:

computeScore(match, team, event) {
 if(hasHighestCoverage(match, team) {
   awardPoints();
 }
 else {
   awardNothing();
 }
}

To award all teams,

for( Team team : match.getTeams()) {
 computeScore(match, team, event);
}

Testing

While that went well, testing wasn't so smooth at times. Because the wakeup period (or frequency of event) is 1 day, I tried to add build data and commit data with Timestamps 1 day apart from the previous. For some weird reason, that would throw an error. I noticed the example didn't require such, so I ignored it myself.

At first, I was only testing with one team in a match, which is not practical with such an event. I also realized the TestHelper class only included a simpleMatch method that included only one team. So I took the method and modified it slightly to add an additional team. It would throw an error when I tried to use the same project for both teams. So I created two separate projects to go along with the two teams to avoid the problem .

Final Thoughts

I don't know if it was a good or bad thing for my task. On the one hand, I was able to finish my task and did have to implement additional things that other events didn't require, such as the additional test method. However, my task was similar to the example so I don't really have experience retrieving data outside of coverage. I have noticed in my inbox, some of the discussion questions. I haven't been able to really answer most of them.

Hopefully that knowledge others are gaining will eventually be passed on to me. It feels like there's still so much to learn. I would definitely keep the screencasts. I have a very short memory sometimes and it's nice to know I can walkthrough the lecture and examples again.