For senior project today we had our second meeting with our clients. During this meeting, there was some tension between the senior project team and the clients, due to some assumptions we had made about what needed the most development time versus what could be implemented rather easily.
The clients found our assessment to not be a complete assessment, telling us that the majority of the functionality of the site was overlooked. However, we attempted to clarify this by telling them that the functionality they wanted for the other parts of the site was "very functionally important, but also trivial to develop". This was not taken very well and led to the clients challenging us to develop a prototype that incorporated that functionality. To this, we accepted the challenge and have begun making plans to accomplish the prototype by our next client meeting so that we can have a focus group on the software and product.
One of the major issues we found, that also came up with our adviser, was a misunderstanding about the role of the development process and what software engineering senior projects usually take on. The product description revision for this current iteration of the project has moved the product to being a website through which multiple services are referenced, allowing for a central hub to access these services. This approaches a Services Oriented Architecture, but most of the services (and hopefully not all) can be delivered by pre-existing products, such as Google Calendar, Blogger, Wordpress, existing inventory management systems, etc.
Because of this, while we are working on the prototype, we are focusing on trying to still gather the requirements necessary to design and implement a robust project / people aggregation system, which allows associations between multiple projects and people, with the eventual use of this to be used to post and present projects, find people with similar project interests who meet certain attributes or required skills, and then eventually help with distributing those across multiple types of displays and access points, including but not limited to Websites, Wall Projected Displays, Touch Displays, etc.
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