IS480 Team wiki: 2015T1 Chipmunks Final Wiki
Contents
Project Progress Summary
- Incorporate D3.js in our graphing technologies, instead of solely Highcharts. Took 2 weeks of familiarization in Iteration 3
- First User Test by Sponsor yielded very positive feedback in Iteration 4, Sponsor initiated Capital IQ data stream contract @ USD12,000/year
- Integration of Capital IQ data stream and automatic retrieval of financial data completed in Iteration 5
- Second User Test with senior executives from an Investment Bank giving extremely encouraging statistics and feedback in Iteration 7
- Addition of Investment Model module and removal of Blog module in Iteration 7
- First Lab Test with functional and software testers provided insights on design enhancements we would make. Begun making Performance and Design improvements in Iteration 8
- Investment Model is completed in Iteration 12, with User Testing 3 receiving very positive feedback from 2 Research Assistants on productivity and efficiency
Project Management
Planned Project Schedule
Actual Project Schedule
Team Chipmunks makes use of the following 3 metrics to enable us to be more effective in project planning. Of the 3 metrics, the team introduced the Workload Metric to monitor individual focus segments on a per iteration basis.
- Workload Metrics – The objective of this metric is to ensure that no single segment gets overwhelmed. You might have noticed that we labelled ‘Graphing’ as one of our segments! This is because our application has a pretty strong focus on frontend technologies and visualization. Hence, we made the split to segregate responsibilities for greater trackability.
From Acceptance, Team Chipmunks’ top 2 concerns were 1) unfamiliarity with the technologies and 2) inefficient allocation of resources. These concerns were allayed as the team became proficient in their own roles and technical competencies.
The other 2 risks identified which took the center stage till Mid-Terms were the need for deeper domain knowledge and scope creep. Domain knowledge came in form of 1) understanding the project domain and requirements and 2) translating these requirements into codes. It was later discovered that several functionalities require us to have deep knowledge in the finance and statistics area. The team also experienced requirements churn, which was identified as one of our medium risks.
Upon the Sponsor's request, the documentation, screenshots and visualizations for our Technical Complexity is hosted on our private Google Drive here
Quality of product
Quality Attributes of the System
Performance – Team Chipmunks had testers which reported slowness when navigating through our website. Hence, the team did File Minification using Grunt to compress JavaScript and CSS files to reduce file size and HTTP requests. This reduces the fetch times of these resources. Additionally, Team Chipmunks enabled browser caching to optimize load times upon repeated visits.
Usability – StockParser focuses on visualization of information. Hence it is necessary for the visualizations to be mobile responsive on various resolutions. While our chosen library D3.js allowed us to have great degree of customization, there were no ready-made codes to handle mobile responsiveness. Furthermore, our visualizations go beyond the standard set of a single graph. Hence, multiple tweaks were required to handle multiple visualizations [graphs on graphs] along a single row, responsiveness across multiple
Intermediate Deliverables:
Topic of Interest | Link |
---|---|
Project Management | Minutes |
Metrics | |
Risk Management | |
Change Management | |
Project Overview | Project Overview |
Team's Motivation | |
Project Documentation | Use Case |
Tech & System Architecture | |
Logical Diagram | |
Choice of Technologies | |
Testing | Testing Documentation |
For testing results, assess here:
Team Reflections
This journey has been a tough but fulfilling one for Team Chipmunks. Collectively, the Chipmunks have gelled together, learning each other’s strengths and weaknesses and are proficient in complementing each other’s working style. We focused on constant communication, knowledge sharing and quantitative objectives in goal setting to help us move quickly and effectively as a team.
Individual Reflections