With the program, itself submitted we focused on the final documents that had to be written before the final submission on Wednesday. We did have a slight scare last week after the codes submission as Bartosz noticed that a last minute change to the program caused it to crash if it was run with certain values to the variables. I brought this up to Chris and asked if we could use a previous version of the program for our demonstration whch he was completely fine with.
We delegated the documents so those that worked on the test spec in the planning stage created the test report, I wrote the end-of-project report and the rest of the group focused on the maintenance manual with each person working on one to two sections of the document. A final disappointment occurred in the group this week sadly as Peter informed me that Dan did not show up online at all on Tuesday, did not respond when messaged, and hasn’t submitted the part of the document that he was assigned to work on. The missing work has been picked up by other members of the group and the document should still be completed on time. We have a final meeting arranged for 2 hours before the submission time for final checks and then this projec will be done.
Work done this week:
Wednesday: 4 hours
Thursay: 4 hours
Friday: 4 hours
Monday: 3 hours
Tuesday: 5 hours

Tuesday to Friday was pretty quiet for me as I was working on my robotics assignment. Monday though was the start of integration week so the work has ramped up, I’m trying to come up with tasks to keep people busy but I will probably run out of ideas before the end of the week. Aside from meetings this week I’ve spent most of my time re-editing the exercise videos and now have them ready and at a much smaller file size than when I got them.

Hours worked (excluding meetings):
Monday: 4 hours
Tuesday: 4 hours

Things have been relatively quiet on the group project side this week, I believe most people (myself included) have assignments nearing their due date and have had their attention focused elsewhere. My contribution for this week was editing the 30 exercise videos recorded by peter to be put into the program, the work wasn’t hard but it was long and tedious as each video needed to be cut down, doubled so that it would play well in a loop, and rendered at a lower resolution to reduce the overall file size. even with those changes, all the videos come to a total of close to 400MB. We are currently missing 2 videos that peter has yet recorded but with the robotics assignment due on Friday I’m not expecting them until next week. Once I have received them I’ll need to re-edit all the videos again as Bartosz has asked if we can have versions without and audio. Fun.

Hours worked:
Thurs – 4 hours

Overall we as a group have been very quiet over the Easter break. After our final meeting before Easter, we gave out small jobs to each other and pretty much left it at that with no full meeting since. My jobs were to come up with some new colour schemes for GUI and to edit the exercise videos. Some new colour schemes have been made and the changes to replicate them saved to .txt files, but I did not receive the videos I need to edit till last night so I will complete those today. Total time worked over easter: 4 hours

[:en]As mentioned in last week’s blog the group wasn’t as productive as usual because of the assignment due on Monday. Despite this, we still help our usual meetings including the after tutorial meeting, design spec feedback meeting, and design spec review meeting. aside from a few late arrivals to meetings, there were no issues with any group members and the project is keeping up with our timetable (if not a little ahead in some areas). I have continued to create a full breakdown of coding tasks and begun adding them to my Gantt chart, but at this rate, the coding section has been worked on I feel like anything I create will be closer to a rough guideline than a strict schedule (certainly not a complaint). I’m still aiming to complete it as it would be good to help us keep track of our remaining tasks and help with deligation.

Hours worked:
Wednesday: 2 hours
Friday: 1 hour
Monday: 1 hour
Tuesday: 2 hours[:]

[:en]This week hasn’t been too eventful, though it has left me with some concerns. I’ve acted on the comments we received on the UI documents and made the proper adjustments, I have a good breakdown of all the tasks for each aspect of the project except for the final coding. I’m debating whether or not to create a general Gantt for the project and then Gantt charts for each aspect. Either way, I think it’s going to turn out pretty messy. From my regular little updates with Peter, it sounds like the design spec is now making good progress (If Peter wasn’t our best coder I think he would have made a better group leader).
My biggest concern is now with QA management and Alex and Dan. Despite being given clearly laid out tasks and being reminded multiple times over the week they still haven’t (at the time of writing) updated their blogs or done it to a standard that I can see Laurence deeming acceptable. I need to come up with a strategy for handling them as reminders on discord don’t seem to work. My current plan is on Wednesday to move him off of QA management and back onto design spec and once the design spec has been submitted possibly take Alex off of QA too and put Peter in charge of it. If peter takes more of an overview role during the coding phase I believe it will give us a better chance of maintaining a proper coding standard across all of our work.
I’ve spoken with most of the members of our group and the majority of us have an assignment due for next Monday, I probably won’t be expecting too much group project work done for at least the first half of next week because of it.
Hours worked:
Wednesday: 2 hours
Friday: 1 hour 30 minutes
Sunday: 1 hour
Monday: 1 hour
Tuesday: 1 hour 30 minutes[:]

[:en]The first week of taking over as full-time project leader and honestly I don’t feel like I’ve done as much as I should of. Most of my working hours for the week have been in meetings coordinating and reviewing work and I find out last minute that work assigned in a meeting I didn’t take part in hasn’t been done due to a communication issue and hasn’t been followed up on until it’s too late. I think I really should be a part of every meeting that the group holds now even if I’m not directly involved in the work (I probably should have been doing that from the beginning).

I’ve also tried creating a table of all tasks, their due dates, and dependencies. I tried asking everyone in the group to send me a list of tasks they needed to do for their part of the project as well as any work they might need from other parts to complete theirs, the few that responded didn’t give much detail so I decided to create it from scratch. I feel like I have pretty good lists for UI, testing, and design spec but I’m struggling to split the info on the coding and Java FX into their own categories. I also tried creating a Gantt chart for the project but I haven’t made one in years and my first attempt is a mess. I’ll want to create another iteration before I want to show it off.

We also received feedback on the UI docs this week, looks like I made some stupid mistakes. We’ll go through the feedback at our Wednesday meeting and I’ll fix the docs next week.

Hours worked:
Wed-2 hour
Fri-1 hour
Tuesday-2 hours[:]

[:en]After our Wednesday meeting, we arranged a meeting for Friday where I could receive feedback on the UI documents I had created and make adjustments before submission. We also planned on covering the QA summary during the Friday meeting but Alex our QA manager was unable to make the meeting. After receiving feedback and having it pointed out to me that my Use Case Document did not follow the layout and structure requested in SE.QA.02 I made the adjustments over the weekend ready for a final document review meeting on Monday before the documents were submitted. One of the seqa docs says that for any review meeting the project manager (me), the QA manager (Alex), and the Author (also me in this case) should be present, I invited Peter and Bartosz to take part as well as Bartosz also worked on the UI design and Peter could act as the Project manager rather than me pulling double duty. Sadly Alex was unable to make it again and we had to reschedule for Tuesday where we finally got the meeting done and the documents submitted. After the meeting, I asked Alex if him missing meetings was going to be a recurring issue and if so would it be best if someone else would be better suited for the role (I understand his time difference and I don’t blame him but I would also like to solve this issue now rather than later when someone else taking over the role would be a bigger task). I asked him to have a think about his position and we can discuss it more formally after our tutorial meeting on Wednesday.[:]

[:en]In the previous week’s meeting, we began to decide on our project leader and quality manager as well as a deputy for each of those roles. I was given the role of project leader while peter became my deputy. while I haven’t really started to fully take on the project management role but me and peter took part in multiple meetings with Dan and Rowan to review the work done on the architecture side of the project and talk about what needs doing to get them back on track. My main task for this week was to create the first version of the Use Case Document to be presented during next week’s meeting, which I can then receive feedback on both the document and the presentation and spend next week improving the documents so that they are ready for the due date. Once the UI documentation has is ready for submission I intend to move into a more full-time project management role and help out where I can while organizing and keeping track of everyone’s work.[:de]In the previous week’s meeting, we began to decide on our project leader and quality manager as well as a deputy for each of those roles. I was given the role of project leader while peter became my deputy. while I haven’t really started to fully take on the project management role me and peter took part in multiple meetings with Dan and Rowan to review the work done on the architecture side of the project and talk about what needs doing to get them back on track. My main task for this week was to create the first version of the Use Case Document to be presented during next week’s meeting, which I can then receive feedback on both the document and the presentation and spend next week improving the documents so that they are ready for the due date. Once the UI documentation has is ready for submission I intend to move into a more full-time project management role and help out where I can while organizing and keeping track of everyone’s work.[:]

[:en]I spent most of the start of week 2 taking part in meetings with other members of the group who were in charge of other parts of the project to discuss the UI design and how it relates to their work. I had a meeting with the testing team on how to create tests around the initial UI design we had created rather than just general tests and I had a meeting with the architecture team on what features we wanted to implement in the UI so they could find the appropriate libraries we would need. I have done further work on the UI presentation to display the user’s experience when performing each of the programs main function, I am unsure about some of the parts of the presentation as the slides do repeat themselves and my notes are a little more than “brief”; SEQA4 is quite vague about details of the online presentation so I want to ask Laurence about it in our next tutorial. I over-promised on the amount of work I would achieve this week as I haven’t started officially on the use-case document so my personal goal for next week is to at least create an initial version of that using the UI notes I have created.[:de][:]