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IS480 Team wiki: 2011T1 Geographia Final

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Project Progress Summary

Project Highlights and Challenges

As in every endeavor, we faced challenges in our learning journey and to our surprise, the three most major challenges stem from project management but not from the new technology adoption, which came under our control gradually. The three challenges we faced which also made us grow together during our journey are: 1) Taking up a project filled with vague requirements 2) Negotiating with sponsor to accommodate advanced admin module, and 3) Technology change request.

1. Taking up a project filled with vague requirements - entering a real world

Our project sponsor engaged us first approached us to materialize his ideas on creating an interactive and effective geography course-ware for 4 geography modules , namely climograph, global climate, historical storms, and urbanization, with one back-end user behavior tracking module. However, he was still in liaison stage with the pilot user group and was not very certain of detailed requirements except for the first module. Moreover, we were warned that historical storms and urbanization modules are likely to be changed. It was hard for us to gauge our scope and to prepare ourselves with technical skill during the summer.

1.1 Attempting to live with uncertainties - Incremental requirement gathering and building quick prototypes

In the beginning, as none of us have worked on a real world project, we were uncomfortable with not being able to know all the requirements from the start and to expect the big changes. We even tried to get to know the detailed requirements for at least two modules in advance. But to no avail. Gradually, our group tried to live with the uncertainties by

  1. meeting up with our sponsor weekly
  2. asking for detailed requirements for the next module only near the end of the previous iteration
  3. making prototypes to let our sponsor and client look and feel while avoiding costly changes
  4. designing flexible system

Although our approach could not get rid of the uncertainty in scope risk, we are more or less sure that we are delivering what our client and sponsor really need.

1.2 Module Change Request for 2 times & we were cushioned

As expected, we were requested to change the Historical Storm module to Climate Change module and later to Geography of development especially between Acceptance and Midterm Presentation. We kind of wasted about two weeks because of the changes in researching the concepts, building prototypes and equipping ourselves with new technical skills. However, because of these changes, we have also learnt how to better manage the sponsor uncertainties while not wasting too much of our effort and time.

We have also learnt along the way the importance of choosing the appropriate prototyping software. At first, we built the draft interface in flex and it takes usually about one week to let the sponsor get the look and feel. The changes made were very costly as we needed to throw some codes completely. Later, we tried several wireframing softwares such as mockflow , Pencil Project to better communicate with the Sponsor. However, as those softwares were emphasizing more on website building while our focus is on each module user interaction and transition, we needed to look for an alternative and it is Microsoft Powerpoint. Although we in general use it for presentation purpose, because of our project challenges and Flex nature we have found that powerpoint is also a good software to mock up an interactive application. In it, we can show how the transition would be when the user click certain button, before and after stage of a component due to user’s interaction. We managed to stimulate like a real Flex application without committing ourselves to coding the uncertain parts.

We have as well learnt to appreciate the importance of prototyping prior to implementation and frequent communication especially when our sponsor changed the historical storm module to the climate change module and later to geography of development. The 2 module change request comes only after we have built our prototypes but these two incident only costed us about one week and we did not have to throw a single line of code. If we were to build the prototype in flex, our group would have been reluctant to accept the change as building the prototype will usually take at least one week and the opportunity cost is high.

2.Technology Change Suggestion – choosing the road less travelled

With the geography of development module request, being a GIS Prof. and having handled thematic map in Flex, our sponsor suggested us to change the whole project to javascript. He reasoned that Flex has severe performance issue when it comes to thematic map as they are very detailed and large in file size. Our detailed decision making and our team management during that time could be found hereunder Crossroad I and II.

3. Negotiating with sponsor to accommodate advanced admin module

3.1 Getting to know the real users’ need & proposing admin module

After we have built the first two modules, climograph and global climate, we let our pilot user group including teachers to test out and welcomed any form of feedback and request. The most prominent and consistent teachers’ request in global climate module was to change some weather stations. At that time, the teachers needed to email us with the data to make the changes. Our team immediately anticipated that the application owner, currently our sponsor, will need to cater to all these kind of request if we do not provide the functionality for teachers to customize the lesson content or data on their own. Hence, our team tried to persuade our sponsor to let us substitute urbanization module with admin module, which will reduce unproductive workload on him in case the software is brought to the commercialization stage. However, our sponsor had strong strategic reasons and was reluctant to change his mind.

3.2 Sponsor point of view

As this is our sponsor’s first time in initiating a geography courseware for secondary students, he just had an intention of proving his concepts and hence he first requested us to focus on front end designs. Our sponsor would like to take up our suggestion only when there is a favorable acceptance of the courseware. Moreover, our sponsor was quite reluctant to let his server used by the teachers.

3.3 Supervisor Suggestion – the turning point

When we brought up the same dilemma to our supervisor Prof. Jason, he asked us to respect our sponsor’s concern but at the same time, pointed out to capitalize the data load and save from local disk functionality from climograph module and allow Prof. Kam to switch it off if he really does not want it. Although the suggestion sounds simple and commonsense, we were at first blind from this option as we were in a developer mindset,who just look out to fulfill what are requested, and not that of an application owner who welcome new feature if it was value add. Indeed, a turning point for all of us. Hence, before midterm we duplicated the data load from local disk function within climograph module and integrated it into the global climate module. Certainly, we were aware that the uploading from local disk function to make content changes come with shortcomings- teachers would need to share the new content in thumbdrive or via email but we felt that we should not nag our sponsor further.

3.4 IS480 review panel request during the midterm presentation

As expected, we faced critical feedback from the IS480 review panel for our admin module at that time, for global climate module only, during our midterm presentation. The two main points were to

  1. Instead of XML, the web native data format let the users use CSV, the more user friendly data format which they can use to edit the data in excel instead of using the data grid we built. Although our data grid, which we replicated from climograph module, in Global Climate module could give more precise and detailed error messages side by side, teachers need to have internet connection to edit data which usually turns out to be a lot and data has to be manually keyed in - copy pasting the whole chunk of data was not there.
  2. The second feedback was to make the admin more advanced so that the updated data by the teacher could be retrieved at one click -refreshing the browser.

Hence, after our midterm presentation, we brought up the same request to our sponsor to let us do the advanced admin in which teachers can upload the data to the server and share easily with the students and other teachers. Our sponsor finally allowed. We have also managed to change our front-end data editing format to CSV.

Thanks to IS480 review panel candid feedback and our sponsor open-mindedness, our system can now be used to teach related geography concepts effectively, collaborate in lesson planning, and the content is easily sharable. We are also proud that we have managed to merge the feedback coming from two different ends and have come up with a better and more flexible system. Moreover, during our sponsor’s workshop with 16 Geography teachers from 7 different schools, there was a consistent positive feedback on the flexibility that the admin module gives them as Ministry of Educational provide general syllabus and allow each school to adopt its own curriculum. During the workshop, we have found out that teachers from different school focus on different regions such as tropical region, asia pacific or world in general.

Project Challenges

Project Achievements

Project Management

Project Schedule (Plan vs Actual)

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Project Metrics

Bug Metric

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Schedule Metric

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Technical Complexity

  • Click here to view the detailed explanation on the project's technical complexity

Quality of Project

Deployment

Testing