Software Engineering Collaboration 5

This week our team had our first sprint completion celebration. We all finished our sprints and figured out the new ones. We had candy bars to celebrate our first milestone. We had our first "blockage" because we still cannot successfully install the version from Queen's College GitHub site. We have contacted the head librarian from Queen's College and had an exciting response from him. They are working on getting some updates pushed, but we have to wait for that before we can proceed with the changes. Our plan is to use the original version from Ball State so that we can at least start looking at the code. Jacob V and Matt have been working on working through the install issues while the rest of the team is working on a mock-up for the CSS changes. Their plan is to review their designs and choose one to present to the rest of the team.

Software Engineering Collaboration 4

Today, we talked about stand up meetings. The concept of a stand up meeting is that it should be short. It gives a quick overview of where each team member is on a project without monopolizing valuable time or one person taking over the entire meeting. The thought is that no one wants to stand for long. The meeting should be about a minute per person and the entire meeting should take less than 15 minutes. There are three questions that should be addressed.

1.     What did you do yesterday?
2.     What will you do today?
3.     Are there any impediments in your way?

In a normal workplace this would be done daily so that issues and timing problems would be discovered before the sprint due date.Our group had time to work toward the end of class. We used the time to ask any pending questions we had and then the team members decided to pull up a php file from OpenRoom and talk about the code. It was very productive and everyone was catching on to the differences from languages they already knew pretty quickly.

Software Engineering Collaboration 3

When our team met the first time, it was our responsibility to overview the project. I explained to them that we would be using an OSS, Open Room for the library, but there were some changes we wanted to make before we made it available to our patrons. Open Room was designed by Ball State University in 2010 as an online reservation system so that patrons could check out study rooms in the library without interacting with library staff. The product owner often gives the requirements in form of a story: As a <type of user> I want to <do something>, so that <some value is created>.

Since the program was developed 7 years ago, there are some technologies that can be improved on to make some of the setup and admin functionalities. We also would like to make the program "feel" more like a library website so that our patrons have a sense of familiarity when they are making reservations. Our story might be: As the product owners, we want to improve administrative functionality and the look and feel of the website so that both the patrons and the software admin can have a successful experience when using the application.

After the overview, our team talked about what tools we plan to use. Since Queens College has since taken over the maintenance of OpenRooms and has it set up in GitHub, we decided we would use GitHub to track our changes. We also decided to use Slack as our method of communication. Slack will be helpful because it will allow them to share code when needed. 

Software Engineering Collaboration 2

The first couple class periods, Dr. Vail introduced us to scrum and agile. He talked about his personal experiences while away on his sabbatical. He talked about the Agile Manifesto list http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html. He also gave many suggestions and guidelines for our projects. There are two other teams with two other projects. He made it clear that students were expected to work five hours outside of class. Each group already has an assigned Product Owner, but would need to assign a Scrum Master. Those are the only two roles in scrum, everyone else are team members.

Software Engineering Collaboration

Informatics administration is trying something new this semester. We are collaborating with Dr. Vail from the Computer Science Department. He is implementing a new work system (framework) that he was able to observe and participate in during his sabbatical in Spring of 2016 with his software engineering course, CSIS-457. The new system is called Scrum. It has become very popular in the developing world. The basic concept of the system is to meet often and set realistic goals (sprints). At each meeting, you would re-assess plan (backlog) and plan the next sprint. One of the main goals of scrum is to improve a product in a faster manner by focusing on smaller tasks with a high intensity.

Dr. Vail invited us to propose some project ideas for a group of five students to work on. We met with him and proposed a few different projects that we thought would be manageable for a semester time period. We found a project that should work well with the scrum framework and help our department with a legitimate project. He invited us to be the Product Owner. This is one of three roles in scrum. The Product Owner helps the team prioritize on what is needed to be completed first. We have committed to attempt to attend most of the class periods on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This should help our team move at a decent pace while allowing us to learn and observe scrum in process. We are interested in analyzing this system to see if it would benefit us to adopt it with our development team.