Of Deprecations and Weirdness: First Progress of QA Class Project
Hello and welcome to another blog post of mine. This time, I will be telling you a very tragic story about a damsel in a lot of distress. lol no jk. I’m here to talk about my experience of the very first class project in my Software Quality Assurance class.
It all began in early October, when I and the whole class students were assigned to create a user story to improve or make a new feature for a project called Kape. What is Kape you ask? Well, Kape is a web application that connects job-seeking students with companies that are also looking for new hires. Kape is actually a legacy code from previous students who also took the Software Quality Assurance Class.
Experience?
If i could sum it up with one word, it’ll definitely be this: Hellish. Don’t get me wrong, I do love some challenge, but I love that under normal circumstances. This project though? Not normal in the slightest.
Challenge #1: Outdated Libraries
Since this is a legacy code, most of the libraries used by Kape are outdated, even deprecated. In normal circumstances, this would be very dangerous because it would destroy other projects that use the same library but with different versions. But thank god virtual environments exist, coming in and saving the day.
So, the deprecated versions of the libraries are now installed in the virtual environment. Everything should be all well right? Nope.
Challenge #2: Psycopg2 and It’s Weirdness
Psycopg is the most popular PostgreSQL database adapter for the Python programming language.
In the case of Kape, the requirements.txt asks for Psycopg2 version 2.6. But for some reason (that I still have no idea what it is), Kape doesn’t want to migrate the databases using Psycopg2 version 2.6 on my local machine.
I searched high and low through the web, rummaging through Stack Overflow and Github, but no answers are found. I finally asked one of my friends what’s causing this issue.
Apparently, I have to change the version of Psycopg2 from 2.6 to 2.7. Why? Don’t ask me. But it works. And that’s very weird, and I’ve had my fair share of weirdness during my time studying computer science.
So after all that Psycopg2 nonsense, the database is finally up and running and the project is executed as intended.
Challenge #3: Actually Writing the User Story Implementation
This part right here, I have no one to blame but myself actually hahaha.
So, the project uses Node.js, in which I literally have 0% knowledge about it. So the whole journey of creating tests and writing the implementation was a harrowing experience. I spent hours trying to figure out how it works, sorting through the massive amount of files and how they connect with each other. In the end I managed to implement the feature successfully, but I felt like I could do so much better if I actually had a little bit of Node.js knowledge.
On the bright side, I finally have motivation to study a new language for website development. I’ve been putting that in the backburner for quite some time but had no time to do it. Now, I have to do it!
All in all, this class really pushed me to do my best and rack through my brain to find the solutions. I hope the next progress will be much easier than this. Wish me luck!
