Fall 2007

A lot has happened since last Friday. (I think that's how I should always start my journals). On Sunday our small team of Felipe, Hubert, Kevin, and me met again; Felipe inked out the mock-ups we created very nicely, and we thought of more ideas for Authoring content.
On Monday I didn't attend class (I have Elec 493 on Mondays at 1; I have to take it to graduate, so I have to show up there occasionally). This evidently was a bad choice, as the rest of the class took advantage of my absence and appointed me the leader of a few very important aspects. I'm the Code Master, so (once I figure out how to actually work with branches in VS's source control) no one will be allowed to check into the main branch except for me and Brad. I'm also the leader of the Backend team, which right now means I'm the largest obstacle in the path of our workflow. (Remember that being the one who is responsible does not necessarily imply either that you are the roadblock or that you have to be doing all the work yourself. -- SW)We need to get the interface that everyone will use ironed out (or at least sorta cobbled together) so that everyone else can start programming against it. Brad says (and I agree) that this is more or less a one- or two-person job, so I have work to do.
Fortunately, I have made substantial progress towards that. I created the class's Solution in the repository and created projects for the Backend's code. I created a simple, temporary interface for interacting with a couple of the data objects (IEntity and IContent... a link to documentation when I have time to write one :-)) that actually interacts with the Atelier database that I created in our SQL Server. I also made the DB more secure than *ahem* other Comp 410 classes have done, as I created a "comp410" user to access the database, and I'm not using the general Sql Server superuser. Also, I'm storing the username and password in the registry, not the web.config file. I feel good about these achievements, since I've never created databases before, and I've never worked with the registry before. I also created a coding standards document as I was doing this.
We also had our second customer meeting on Thursday. I was quite amazed that Mr. Scanlon had remembered all of our names. This meeting went smoother than the previous one. I think that he didn't want to bias our opinions of how to design the system the first time, and was quite reluctant to actually give us necessary information, but today's focus was on us presenting him our initial ideas, and thus his role was to redirect our momentum if he found it to be improper, rather than to push us off.

We had a couple of other meetings this week; one as the group of team leaders on Tuesday, one on Wednesday in class, another during Lunch on Thursday as team leaders, and another directly after that as the Backend team. None of these were particularly productive. I think the "agenda" for both of the leader meetings was to establish the system architecture, and in both of them we got bogged down in little details about things like data types rather than working out the big picture flow of how data moves in the whole system and what general things need to happen. I kinda feel like in our lack of progress people have decided that the system architecture is "part of the backend" and thus something they can shrug off onto me.
Without a clear picture of what the different systems need, though, it's difficult to start programming, so in terms of actual written code, all we have to show is my proof-of-concept stub code.
Also, Derek was present but not participating at the first team leader meeting; he wasn't even sitting at the table, but was instead leaning against the wall five feet away the whole time. I couldn't quite figure this out; it seems like miscommunication was going on somewhere though.

If the task of doing the initial design is actually mine now, then the solution is for me to sit down and do it. Fortunately, I like creating architectures and fell I've gotten fairly good at it over the years.

Why must you be alone on this?   Should you be alone on this?  Or is everyone else just taking a passive role and passing the buck to you?  -- SW
But I think the biggest thing we need is more forceful/specific leadership from Brad. He just now uploaded milestone expectations but having things like this, and in even greater detail, would be useful. Brad could also do a better job of keeping us on track in meetings to get the big picture figured out.

But at the same time, others have pointed out that this led to a disconnect within the group during the presentation that the customer noticed when he said he would like to see more people participating. How can you split into groups yet still have an idea of what is going on in things like the presentation?

We need to get the big picture of the system decided. I feel this is holding me back. We also need more communication and direction from leadership.

This is the same as the milestone proposals for change.

Brad needs to be more specific on tasking us, and needs to keep us on track better. Felipe had good content, but he spoke too quickly during his presentation; I knew what he was talking about and even I had a little difficulty following it.
I think most people are working well, and especially Corey's team seems to be really pressing me to get the backend interface finished, so I guess they're eager to work.

I think that we should all agree as a new standard that anyone giving a presentation shouldn't have any pictures of people as a background.