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Fall 2007

Fall 2007 > J04 9-21-07 > View Response #12

J04 9-21-07: View Response #12

Name	Sohum Misra
Milestone Status: Gains made (If possible, include hyperlinks to what you mention here.)	Brainstormed views in small groups, for "Searching/Navigation", "Authoring" and "Viewing Content" Created GUI screens for customer presentation meeting. Met with customer and showed GUI designs. Customer seemed to like design but wanted more detail. Customer especially liked the "interactive search" idea that we developed. Silverlight looks like a perfect technology to get some of the things that we want to do. An advanced research team will be looking into it. I believe we have our repository up and several different projects set up. This is good for when we get to coding.
Milestone Status: Obstacles Encountered	I can only really speculate about obstacles encountered by my teams--primarily the customer presentation team and the content viewing team. Why are you "speculating"? As the team leader, shouldn't you know? Or is there a communications problem here where you and your teams have disconnected? -- SW I'm not team leader. By my teams I mean teams I am a part of. -SM Deciding on a final design was difficult because almost everyone had differing points of view. Working with Photoshop was difficult because computer did not have enough RAM. Trouble with Photoshop smart objects because we didn't really know what they were. The problem was that if the canvas size of a smart object was changed, it did not automatically update in the original document. Trying to create designs and work together was inefficient because development almost had to take place in only one computer. We ran out of time creating the designs which is why they may not have been as well thought out or as good as they could have been.
Milestone Status: Proposed Solutions	After meeting with the class, the customer prep team tried to take the best of all the designs and mix them together. During the designing stage Jeeyun and I realized some inconsistencies and used our judgment to decide what to do. Tablet PC's with 2 gigs of RAM are here. :P I also bought a gig of RAM for my laptop. We learned from our mistakes and will probably either research smart objects or resolve to use "Groups" to organize layers. We solved this by creating a "frame" in Photoshop and then breaking into solo workstations and splitting up the screens we had to do. I don't think we could organize our time better in the customer prep team because everyone involved had conflicting meetings and we could only really decide our final designs the class before the customer meeting. In the future, if we have this team, we should have an idea of what to do one class period earlier. A couple of thoughts on the Adobe PS front--first and most obviously, the tablets don't have PS. Also seriously consider whether it's worth the overhead of learning to use new and unfamiliar software to make a small gain in terms of aesthetic appeal. I'm a huge fan of MSPaint, but to each his own. --Chelsea The software is not unfamiliar--but using it collaboratively is. Also, given that the customer wants the site to look "cool" I think PS or some other good graphics development software will be essential. -SM
Development Process: What seems to be working and why?	The division into smaller teams is a strategy that worked in the warmup that we are using now. This has allowed people to concentrate on certain aspects of the program and thus do a better job on it. Brad appointed a Code "Master" (forgot the exact terminology) in Aaron to make sure that all committed code and such is workable. I think Aaron will also be deeply involved in the structure of the program which is good because he has a lot of experience in both OOP and C#. Brad appointed a Time Czar in Hubert, to keep us on track in meetings. This will hopefully address a concern that was brought up by almost everyone at one of our group meetings. Customer meeting was much more organized and as a result we were able to discuss far more efficiently.
Development Process: What does not seem to be working and why?	Too many groups! I'm not sure how many groups I'm currently part of (I think 2) but it does get a little confusing. Also, giving enough time to each group also becomes an issue. It doesn't seem like communication between groups, group leaders, project managers and team members is very effective. I'm going into the weekend without any planned meetings and the milestones were put up last evening. Not sure if this is as much of a problem (it's a massive problem!) but team members don't really know what's going on in other teams or at an organizational level.
Development Process: Proposals for change--issues addressed and why the change will help.	I think fewer groups would be better. However, given that these are "ad hoc" groups, perhaps things will become more organized when everyone has well-defined milestones. Consider that this lack of structure may make it difficult to define milestones. How can this problem be solved? Nothing I can do here but goad them into doing better. Perhaps we could have regularly scheduled meeting times so we don't have to run around all over the place from one meeting to another. How about creating some clear concrete communications channels and protocols so there is no confusion about what to do. Take an active rolere here! - SW I'm not sure what the PM's wishes are with regards to how much information each team member needs to know. I think what we could do is designate the class meetings as the time to disperse knowledge about the "widescreen" view of the project.
Peer review: Positive or negative feedback for other class members	The wireframes produced by Felipe's team were very useful.(ref? -- SW) The presentations by Felipe and Matt were well organized and well presented.
Additional Comments	I completely forgot about this journal. Hope this is just a one-time occurrence, because we won't be getting a new Tablet PC every Friday. :) Understandable. We'll still have to take off 5pts for being less than 12 hours late though.