Status Update

Weekly Development Report

CORE

The team concentrated on Exception Handling, which is 70% complete and due to be finished shortly. Reliable Shutdown will be finished by the end of the sprint. Requirements have been gathered for the Revised Monad Stack and are due to be scheduled for the next sprint. Code Restructuring is 80% finished. Improving the structure of the testing module remains to be done.

DAEDALUS

The main goal of the week was the preparation of the 0.9.0 Daedalus release, which will be shipped with Cardano 1.1. One of the bigger tasks was also finalized, refactoring the build system to use Gulp 3, which solved a lot of issues introduced with the upgrade of the WebPack to version 2. Work on wallet account features continued.

WALLET BACKEND

The team put a lot of time into preparation for the exchange code migration. The instructions on the pending migration have been sent to the exchanges. Data Consistency has been merged to Master. The team is pushing to have Targeting Dev complete shortly. A performance improvement for Multi-Action Output has been merged to Master. The team is currently deciding whether other performance improvement initiatives are required. A phased approach is planned once the Data and Performance workstreams are completed and as improvements become available. Additionally, Baselining has also been completed successfully. The team has successfully delivered a prototype of the Exchange Simulator (Request Generator) for ongoing tests and performance improvements. Currently, a team member is working on a tool (“dbgen”) to generate synthetic data for the wallet backend, to be used by the benchmarks. Various other tasks regarding the wallet backend have been simplified or integrated. A key team member will give new estimates on task completion. Two of the team members will concentrate on manual testing of the API associated with the tasks. The old and the new API will coexist (at least initially) on the same wallet backend, making integration easier. The Daedalus team can start integrating the new API, and can do this in a “cherry-picking” fashion. There is no need to commit to the whole V1 API just yet. A key team member has been designated as the squad lead currently working on this, incorporating the specification from another team member and translating it into an “executable specification” for the new wallet. A senior engineer is working on a semi-formal specification that will shape the data layer and its storage requirements. Partial implementation has started and a significant portion of the testing framework is in place (code that translates simplified descriptions of the transactions and blocks into real data types). A team member has started working on the generation of synthetic test data. Another key member is working on plugging the wallet backend to this new data layer.

NETWORKING

The team focused on the relay connection timeout, which will be included in the next release. Streaming block syncing is a dependency for Deadalus to provide a block syncing progress bar with smooth (rather than jumpy) reporting.

DEVOPS

Last week the DevOps team coordinated branch off in preparation for the Cardano SL 1.1 release. The first pass of the staging 1.1 deployment was completed with one issue found in relation to moving the CI to a new provider. Further highlights of the week have been a successful release of stack2nix, as well as work with exchanges on implementing efficiency and scalability improvements.

MISC. WORKSTREAMS

• Smart Contracts Language

The stakeholders have had detailed discussions about deliverables for the workstream of a new language designed to make it easier to create smart contracts. A team member is working on the language core and language initiative (specification, presentation and the tutorial for developers, which are prerequisites for this workstream).

• Sidechains

Research is progressing with a view to presenting the findings in a formal academic context in the near future.

Tech Support

There was a decrease in the number of new tickets last week. The tech support team received a total of 593 tickets, out of which 308 were successfully resolved and the remaining 285 are being followed up. The top reported issues were:

• Unable to connect
• Various transaction questions
• Issues with using the wallet
• Antivirus-related issues
• Cannot launch