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).

Going Into Next Quarter

So, for work next quarter, I am working 3 positions:

1. Grader for one of my professors (~10 hours per week).
2. Lab Assistant for the Software Engineering labs (~10 hours per week).
3. Article Writer for Freemmogamer.com.

So, those put down, that is my approximate work schedule for next quarter. More on that and the real schedule once I have my final hours.

So, aside, I wrote a new article reviewing Crowns of Power. I will post the article link and update when I get confirmation on it.

Senior Project Week 10

So, this week we concluded the first quarter of our senior project. The project itself has been a constant uphill battle, with no clear direction or end in site as to what the goals of the project are. However, we have finally gotten a solid response as to what our client really wants, which to our dismay, does not require our programming or software engineering abilities. Hence, there is some confusion in the air about the next direction to take the project in. However, the reflection meeting should give us some feedback on that.

On Tuesday, we conducted our end of the quarter interim presentation to the faculty and our peers. Overall, the presentation went fairly well. We were called on a few things, but were able to defend our reasoning and decisions very well. We also gained some very nice feedback, while being able to relate to several of the faculty members and other teams of peers.

Wednesday, we met to finalize documentation of the project for self-assessment and reflection, prior to the actual reflection meeting. This went well as well. Aside to this fact, one of my teammates and I met with our client 1 on 1. I acted solely as a note taker, to allow for the meeting to progress without multiple sources of input, feedback, and re-direction. This meeting has had some serious implications as to the direction of the project, which leaves us waiting to speak with our adviser and department chair on the matter.

So, as a final statistic, here are some interesting values that have come out of this project:

Maximum Requirements Churn for Quarter: Week 3 - 19 (17 new, 2 modified requirements)
Average Requirements Churn per Week: 8.89 / Week (5.22 new features / week, 3.33 feature modifications / week, 0.33 deletions / week).
Total Hours Worked for Team (as a part time project with other classes): 510 estimated, 634 actually worked

I hope this gives some people the scale on which the project has been measured and the kind of effort that was needed to keep up with requirements changes, and how this affected the effort put in to the project.

Project ACE Week 10

So, this week was the wrap up of the project for most of us. I worked with touching up the documents one last time for the Racing Activity, followed by a formal review of the documents and code, in front of peers and managers. Overall, it was received very positively, and Krista and I gained very good feedback.

Aside, worked with Krista on getting some more ideas down for the Board Game activity. Also worked with her on describing where I was with the balancing, gyroscope using robot and the different approaches I've tried. I documented all changes and current thoughts, so that way the next person to follow in my footsteps will have an idea of where it was heading.

So, for the rest of the week we are packing up. Overall, it has been a very fun experience, one I greatly appreciate. I've met some great people: Reza, Faradjine, Krista, and Erika. It'd be a pleasure to work with them again someday on another project.

New Gaming Article - Dungeons and Dragons Online: Unlimited

So, I have two articles published that I wrote for FreeMMOGamer this week. You can find the articles here:

* 10 Reasons to Play DDO: Unlimited
* 10 Reasons Not to Play DDO: Unlimited

I'll keep posting new articles I write using these labels and headings.