Data Collection:

Bears and Bulls makes extensive use of Yahoo! Finance to collect data financial data.  Data collection is done by the get_info() in headerfiles/stockinfoprovider.php.  The function uses two methods for querying data.  The first is using Yahoo! Finance's csv API, which returns a .csv file with the queried parameters. The details of the API can be found at www.gummy-stuff.org/Yahoo-data.htm and http://code.google.com/p/yahoo-finance-managed/wiki/CSVAPI.  The second method was screen scraping individual company pages on Yahoo! Finance, which is only used if information is missing from the first method.   

Testing Yahoo! Finance's csv API was done simply by using a browser and sending queries to Yahoo! Finance.  The returned data was then compared against the data Yahoo! Finance published, as well as E*Trade's published market data.  Screen scraping was tested by calling the function on various tickers and comparing the returned values against the displayed values.  Only a few ticker symbols were tested since they can all be considered the same equivalence class.  

User data was stored in a MySQL database provided by ClearDB.  The schema of the database is provided in database_schema.sql. User data included the leagues they were in, stocks in their portfolios and pending orders.