Project ACE and Alice VI

So, for the summer, I am working on Project ACE and Alice VI for the software engineering department at RIT. I am working on restructuring activities for ACE and performing code fixes and implementations for Alice. So far, everything seems to be going well. I am working with another game design graduate student and a software engineering undergraduate. Both are fun and nice to work with, which is a plus.

Otherwise, work is progressing casually. We made two important bug fixes today with our current version of Alice. We now just need to write the test classes to verify that the bug fixes do not occur again (also so others can test them out). Aside, we've been working hard on the documentation rewrite for the first activity thus far. When we're done with that activity, we will progress by writing a set of common libraries for the controls of the robots. Lastly, we will go through and have them read and checked, followed by a revision of the work to see what we get done.

Work Changes and Shifts for the Quarter

So, I've had a lot of fun trying to balance work, time, and class this quarter. I was trying to take a lot of hours, but ended up giving up a lot of them to work on other things. Hence, work has been interesting. I went from 15 hours, to 17 hours, to 20 hours, to 13 hours, to 15 hours once again. This is because not only personal stuff, but also because of labbies changing their hours and needing different hours covered, etc.

Senior Project - End

It's been a while since an update. Everything went so fast that it became hard to keep track of it all. In the end, we did deliver a release of the project that was feature complete. There were no bugs with the system. However, there were a few "gold" features we had wanted to add, but didn't have the time to.

Looking back on the project, I really don't know what to say. I am unsure how things could have gone better, because of the problems up front. I know that, one of our biggest weaknesses this quarter was the feeling that nothing we did mattered. This was only reinforced by the reintroduction of our previous client at one point, who made it sound as if he would be the deciding man for whether the project was actually used or not. Because of this and our lost momentum from between the quarters, there is little I can say about what else could have been better.

Overall, the team was a great team to work with. I enjoyed the experience, and am now doing masters work in game design and development. I wish my colleagues good luck and farewell. I hope their current job pursuits do well for them.

Senior Project - Fall - Week 6

So, this week we presented our current project to our sponsor. After working diligently over the weekend and before the meeting, we were able to present a "feature complete" version of the project, which we were praised for. Personally, I am surprised we were able to pull it together so fast. It really is nice to see it working well.

For the next two weeks, we're working on testing and evaluating the system. This includes having the latter half of a class from our adviser. The students will test the application and find any bugs we may have missed in design and development thus far. Likewise, we'll be adding new levels of polish to the site, including better graphics, better updates and viewing mechanisms, etc.

Lastly, I will be adding to the admin interface, giving it a statistical viewing portion which will allow for the user to view statistics on events for the site. This feature has been in development for a while, as editing and dealing with the Django admin interface has been much more difficult than I have imagined.

During week 8, we will deliver and deploy the site to them on whatever server they wish. They can then link to it and move the site to wherever they wish.

Senior Project - Fall - Week 5

So, this week we are doing a mini-sprint to finish up the content and functionality of the project. At the end of this week we should be feature complete.

We had an extra meeting with our adviser this week. She picked up on the fact that momentum has nearly slowed to a halt and that integration has not be occurring as it should be. The reason for this, of course, is because we are delivering our product next week in a feature complete state.

Right now, the majority of the work left relies on the front end of the project displaying everything that is vital to the system. This includes people on projects, names, roles, skills needed for projects, the feeds on the project pages, entering new feed information, etc.

I am planning on making all the visibility changes needed to expose functionality and the like for the project. I am hoping to not have to pull a hero move this weekend. We'll see how this goes.

Senior Project - Fall - Week 4

So, for this week, we ended the first sprint on our project on Monday. From what I've fathered, every one of the use cases seems to be done (although, everyone checking in code would be nice). Aside, we have begun divvying up the next set of use cases, of which we'll be near finished within the next week or so.

To be honest and frank, it has been difficult to keep the team on track and keep up decent momentum. Everyone's return to a normal class schedule, on top of senioritis and it being the last quarter for most has made that near impossible. I include myself in that somewhat, as last week alone I spent nearly 30 hours on papers, presentations, and classwork for my game design courses.

So, we're slowly trudging along. Hopefully everything will be finished by week 6, leaving the rest of it to be toyed with and slightly expanded on for the rest of the quarter.

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.