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IS480 Team wiki: 2011T2 Team Members Final Learning Outcomes

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  Team's Learning Avenue   Expected Learning Outcomes   Reflection

 

Acceptance | Midterm | Final

Expected Learning Outcomes

Final

The following learning outcomes are expected from the adoption of the IS480 application project:

 

Technological and Application Skills
  • Combining and experimenting with multiple technologies - Instead of having to code everything from scratch, we learnt to make use of certain existing technologies on the Web (e.g. PHP Ricochet Wrapper, RestKit, Luracast Restler Framework etc.) and modify them to suit our project needs. Due to the limited documentation available for certain libraries, this required us to first experiment with the libraries to understand the logic of and parameters required.

  • Simple and intuitive User Interface (UI) design - Apple specifies User Interface guidelines to ensure a simple and intuitive user experience that is synonymous with the Apple brand. This is known as the iOS Human Interface Guidelines that every iOS app has to adhere to in order to get approved by the App Store. As such, we are proud to say that we have designed The Cage app's user interface according to these guidelines, thereby allowing us to secure an approval from the App Store.

 

Project Management
  • Prioritization of deliverables - We prioritized our project deliverables according to their risk levels so as to allow for more time on riskier and more complex features of the app. This prioritization proved to be very useful as it reduced the stress on the entire team and prevented us from having to spend excessive overtime later on in the project lifecycle. As a result, we were able to add value to our sponsor through multiple updates to The Cage app, while also adding extra features such as modifications to the front-end booking calendar for admins and managers.

  • Strategic resource allocation - The coding of an iPhone app requires the use of the XCode IDE, which is only available on Mac OSX. However, we only had a total of 4 Macbooks for our 6-member team - 2 from our team members who were using Macbooks; and an additional 2 which were provided by our sponsor. As such, in order to circumvent this lack of resources, we had to allocate the Macbooks among members of our team through effective prior planning such that the Macbooks can be handed over to another team member on time for his/her part. In addition, we also shared a locker to contain the Macbooks provided to us by The Cage. This is done so that at any time when there was a need to make changes to our app (e.g. bug-fixing), we are able retrieve any of the Macbooks from the shared locker at SIS level 3 and start coding.

 

Stakeholder Management
  • Essentiality of communication and cooperation - Since the beginning of our project, we made it a point to communicate and agree with our sponsor on the frequency of our meetings and also the means of which we could communicate with them. In addition, whenever we needed help from the sponsor, we would also not hesitate to call them rather than wait till our official meeting. We had also approached our supervisor, Associate Professor Li Yingjiu, to agree on our meeting dates/times with him. In order to ensure common understanding of all stakeholders of our project, we also arranged combined meetings every 4 weeks where our entire team, the sponsor, and our supervisor would get to meet together.

  • Managing sponsor expectations - We make it a point to practice open communication with our sponsor. Whenever there were tasks that we felt we were unable to do, we would communicate this to our sponsor during the meeting itself. Because of this open communication culture we had with our sponsor, we were able to reduce any unnecessary tension, mismatch of expectations, and also ensured efficient meetings.