Fall 2007

My Milestone Report

Not much. The authority system is in place, but it wasn't done early enough to allow the UI team to make a UI for it. Also, the most complicated part of it is yet to come, which is the re-evaluation of authority levels.

I think a lot of people (including me) got buried in work from other classes. Malloc (in comp 320) hit quite a few people, and I had to work on 440 stuff since my partner was going out of town early for Thanksgiving. I think the last few weeks before the original beta start date, we were all pushing hard and neglecting our other classes, and it's caught up with us.

Also, there are some issues with hosting and contracts that are holding up the beta.

Unfortunately there's not much you can do about other classes' work. (Check out other journals, like Felipe's, for the TA's comments on how weeks like this can be handled in the future.) Ideally you'd want to stagger it so you don't lose everyone, like it seemed we did this week, but this was to be expected with having everyone work so hard the two weeks before. Perhaps we could've planned better for it in hindsight.

I think we've finally gotten the site to a point where everything works together, and the components are in place. This means we've finished up most of the design and can just knock out all of our remaining goals. For a while, different pieces were being thrown out and redone, and work was being done in branches, which caused all of us to be working in our own world. Now it's to the point where people are actually being diligent about making sure that their change doesn't break the build or functionality.

I think the most difficult part of this class is that we're essentially starting something from scratch, and building a system, and a development process, up from the ground. We seem to be at the level (at just the right time too) where we've all settled into that. I think that at the end of the semester, even if our project doesn't live up to all of our expectations, if we can say that we came up with a set of practices that allow us all to work together, then we've accomplished a lot. And you've hit one of the main lessons of Comp 410 on the head.

This is where the lack of planning issue would come into play and should be discussed. Same with the customer/legal issues...so there were clearly some problems to discuss this week. --Chelsea

Going off the lack of planning theme, I think you've glossed over it a bit. Yes, "perhaps planning better" is a solution, but if it were that trivial, you'd have done it. What kind of planning would be involved? How would it have helped? I'm glad you saw the problem--as one of the few who touched on the real solution, I wish you'd have expanded further on it.

I think Sohum is continuing to do a fantastic job with the UI, despite being the one person that can give us shiny things to show at the customer meetings. I hope that with Dave moving to your team you'll be able to keep up with everything that you need to add to the site. Please don't hesitate to ask if there's anything us non-frontend teams can do to help you out.

Sorry for getting this journal in a little late. I actually remembered to do it at about 11:55, so I tried to whip something up and get it in tonight.