27A. Decathlon Design 2

Solar Decathlon - PROJECT MANAGEMENT (Google Project: Team 6)

As part of our first group project in Software Engineering class, we were tasked with creating a full mockup of the solar decathalon house management system using Balsamiq.

I was paired with Anthony Kinsey and Noah Wooden. I feel quite fortunate to have these two team members, who are both quite competent when it comes to both programming and web design.

We met a total of four times to put together the initial draft of the mockups. Twice over the phone and twice in person over the past week. We then met one final time on Tuesday for about 5 hours to finalize things and standardize things.

The divvying up of work went very smoothly. This was done during the second meeting. During our third meeting we reviewed the template and reviewed a mockup for the security camera feed page that Anthony and I worked on. Subsequent meetings were used to work on our assigned pages.

As for my input on the issue-driven project management, I thought that it worked well in the beginning, but after things started rolling, since we were all working together, the project really seemed to move along without us having to keep referring back to the issues page (shown below) on our Google project site.

I think tracking issues and assigning issues are probably essential when it comes to working in larger projects with more group members. There are probably many times when the group can't all meet together to do work, and issue tracking definitely helps tasks from falling through the cracks.

During most of our ICS classes, I've found it most beneficial to work together as much as possible. This means physically all being located in the same space rather than corresponding through email or IM. This makes it much easier for us to get immediate feedback from each other. It also helps to focus the team, therefore making the time spent more productive.

Our final two meetings were for 8 hours and 5 hours. I thought we were really able to get a feel for what each person's temperament is and also we were able to share a few laughs and even able to show each other some of the web pages and artwork we've worked on for clients.

All in all, I've enjoyed the design process so far - so far, things have been relatively painless and I've got good group members, which I've come to realize in any work situation is the most important thing.