Fall 2007

See my milestone report here.

 

I actually think this was one of our worst weeks for productivity in a long time. Almost everyone spent their time catching up on work for other classes after the big push last week.

 

Not for me personally but we had: malloc + comp440

I actually think everything is still on track except for access control, which is on the critical path for finishing everthing up by the end of the semester.

I'm really getting worried about ensuring the usability off the final product at this point. I still think there will be a lot of issues that will have to be solved before anyone will actually want to use this thing, but I don't know how to identify them without user testing. At some point you just have to go out and get user feedback. This should just give you more incentive to get the beta going.

The user interface (and I'm including content in this) group is making progress still, but the number of potential features they might need to make is getting rediculous. There is a point where you need to tell the customer that it isn't feasible to finish all of these features by the end of the semester, rather than adding them to a list and disappointing when they are not done.

I hope that we'll get rolling again next week much stronger. If this situation happened again, how would you fix it that week rather than oscillating back and forth between strong and weak weeks? These weeks are particularly frustrating and challenging for the PM, so it will help to be prepared with a solution next time--for example, the last week of classes is demanding, but you may have some loose ends to tie up. How will you keep things going? --Chelsea

Additionally, once we get user testing going, we should be able to address many usability issues quickly.

Other than the time constraints of this week, I think we're still allocating human resources fairly well, although we still need to work towards having the most people work on the stuff that will affect final usability.

Also, it remains to be seen but I think the process where I've been speccing, designing, stubbing and handing off systems has enabled us to bring the last few systems online quite quickly. For notifications I actually did more of this than on access control because of the bad experience with access control difficulties.

We paid for last week's push this week. We'll have to find a balance, and I'm seriously worried about having enough time to polish everything off. Especially with Thanksgiving this week.

The process of handing things off is still rudimentary, as the experience with access control has shown. I'll be interested to see how quickly Rae can get a handle on notifications. On a side note, make sure to keep the team organization documents up-to-date.

There's not much we can do but focus on things that impact usability the most. I'm really worried that not enough people are looking out for our users and really ensuring that this will be something people want to use. Even worse, I think the struggles with the customer have created an environment where a lot of people don't really care, and they'll be happy just to deliver the minimum. The customers, by their consistent foibles in managment and marketing (they need to keep selling us on the idea) have eroded a lot of the momentum and excitement about creating something innovative. This is a legitimate complaint. How can you all clean up the mess and restore confidence/enthusiasm?

Thanks everyone for meeting last week's deadline, and (as corey claimed it) I hope you had a good "week off", but we've still got stuff to get done before this thing goes out the door.