Week One Day Three..

Wednesday 14th March 2007:

9 am Start:

Systems Integration Meeting 9am:

After a very promising start yesterday I decided to produce targets which were realistic at the time for the system integration team today. These targets included:

Version 1.0 system (prototype) to be created by 12. This would show the current status of the features

Between the two versions, we would get the developer to complete their test plan and note any changes to their design too.

Version 1.1 system (prototype) to be created by 3pm. This would include all the features for week one to be fully functional, ready for the demo tomorrow..

And finally to pass on version 1.1 to the website design team to develop the layout etc.

As soon as all the integration team got to the university (9am Start) we had problems straight away which would affect how the day went, unfortunately in negative terms. The main problem was that there were a lot of the first week programmers missing, which meant that we could not create prototype 1.0 because we were missing their feature. This affected our progress for today as we just about collected every ones feature just after 12. I think another thing we did is under estimated our role which was brought up in the meeting at 4pm. Adam West was doing all the integration, ie putting all week ones features together and we realised that he shouldn't have had to do the amount of work he had done. All the problems that came up for certain features he resolved with out the developer being present (the developer went home once the thought their work was done) apart from a few people. Rob Morrisby actually helped make sure his feature worked in the prototype which is what everyone else should have done. By the the time Adam had done the prototype it was coming up to 5 o'clock and the website design team still needed to implement their designs too it.

At the systems integration meeting a lot of issues came up which we need to resolve asap. We need to define the role of system integration and website design and sort out a plan starting from next week. This will be decided at the managers meeting on Friday. I propose that how I allocated a group of integrators to a group of features, this method should be used for the design and website design team as well. That way all the features will work and look consistent too. We will be stressing that their needs more involvement from the developer and its their responsibility alone to make sure that their feature works.

Current Richard Gibbons is trying to add the template to the current prototype but it is hard to see what the final thing will look like, with the demo fast approaching at 11am tomorrow:

Overview:

I think today was a huge set back for this project and we are all to blame. There is no point pointing fingers however I think we have learned a lot of lessons today. Hopefully the demos will go OK tomorrow. On Friday we will have to set some ground rules and re-plan how we are going to approach next week. On a positive note I felt that it has been a good experience for me so far and we can only learn and improve from this only how ever, if all of us gives input.