Senior Project - Fall - Week 3

This week has been, for lack of better words, slow. This is mainly due to everyone getting finally adjusted to their class schedules, and what I feared could be a serious issue: Last Quarter Apathy. While we have made some substantial headway with the project and the current requirements set, the issue arises that, unfortunately, most of the team members have the attitude that as long as we pass this class, then it doesn't really matter what we deliver. This is, of course, a huge problem, in that as professionals, we should work hard to always deliver a quality product, or at least design such a product and lay down the basis for it to be used, maintained, and continued by others. With that being the case, it is looking to become harder and harder to maintain momentum and speed for the project.

So far, the tasks which are targeted to be implemented, with current statuses, are:

1. Full text search of project entries in the database (Myself, Code Complete).
2. Project and Main Page Status Feeds [Probably RSS] (Ben, In Progress).
3. Revamping of Project Models to Suit New Requirements (Matt, In Progress).
4. UI for Main Page, Project Pages, Editting Pages, Login, etc (Adim, Ben, Dylan, In Progress).

Aside, we also have tons of documentation that needs to be accomplished. Because of this, I am also working on that end as well, tracking feature completion, task completion, documenting the system, etc. In short, this is what is targeted for the sprint that ends this week, which is not much, and should be done fairly shortly. If not, this could pose to be a serious problem, as from the end of this week, we only have 4 more viable weeks of development that we can do.

Senior Project - Fall - Week 2

For this week, we had an extremely short meeting with our clients about the project, presenting them with our current use cases and breakdowns of how they tied in with certain feature elements. This led to some basic discussion that, after a whole of around 16 minutes, we were able to wrap up the meeting.

With our use cases now solidly reflecting the current system we are building, we have broken them down and distributed them for two SCRUM sprints between now and when we will next meet with our clients. The total number of use cases, for now, is at 10 while the number of features is around 20-ish. With most of the features already in some state of near completeness based on our previous specification, we should be able to be feature complete by the end of Week 5 of this quarter.

Gaming Article Blues

So, I wrote another article for the site for Freemmogamer.com. However, I submitted that article 4 weeks ago (yeah, nearly a month) and have yet to hear back from them about it. This has made me come to the conclusion that either A) I have been completely written off or B) they're just not wanting to run my article. I have sent two emails in response to see if they'll reply back as to the delay, but I assume that they are neglecting those emails.

Hence, I will say I am out of the article writing gig for now, as they've not replied. I was thinking of applying to MMORPG.com, but at the same time, maybe I will just use the time to do more of my own personal writing and story writing, as the articles were just a passing thing. Perhaps, in work, I will eventually begin to post some of the work I've been doing writing, though I may just wait till I publish some of it.

Senior Project - Fall - Week 1

So, this week, we hit the ground running with a meeting on Monday with the Director for the Center for Student Innovation and our client. During this meeting, we went ahead and laid out the ideas and concepts for approaching the project this quarter, knowing fully well that with the shape the project was left in last quarter and the break that took place between the two quarters of work, that all previous momentum had been lost.

For this quarter, we are trying to accomplish the project now under the constraint of only 7 more weeks of development time (really only 6 weeks seeing as this first week is trying to get back up to speed).

The discussion this week was fruitful, as we were all able to agree and propose a product that could be useful and rewarding for us as developers and for the Center for Student Innovation and our clients. For this, we are scaling away the non-useful requirements of the project, reducing it from a social network with heavy emphasis on project management to a project discovery and aiding site with extremely loose social networking, not built in. This should give us a rich enough feature set to do the job for the clients, as well as give us something focused enough to actually complete the project fairly well and on time.

Along with this, we have come up with a list of the most basic use cases and users that take place within the system. These are going to be delivered to our clients as soon as I hear back the feedback from the team (I compiled them and made diagrams for them appropriately).