1st Iteration Closure -Planned meeting with User, Part A Group Review

Date: 09-Sept-2011
Meeting time: 11:00am - 12:55pm
Venue: Sheppard Library SG223
Attendance: ALL

Today's schedule was to submit the 2nd Iteration as well as present work done so far on Part A which includes the literature review. Meeting with user was called off because he wont be able to turn up. We will receive mail regarding a new meeting date. On the literature review, the team had to merge works done separately into one document however the work on Agile methods and the move towards MDA and MDE proved a challenge as the team was not able to agree on submitting a document for feedback. Some taught that more work needed to be done in this area to make it more presentable whiles others felt submitting it and receiving feedback will allow us to have an idea of what the supervisor thinks. In the end the team agreed not to submit the document but rather work on it. 

Iteration 1 , 2nd Increment - Day 4

Date: 6th Sept 2011
Meeting time: 11:00am - 12:15pm
Venue: Sheppard Library SG 223
Attendance: ALL

Today's meeting was work on the final integration for the 2nd iteration. 90% of the integration had already been completed. The team sat to to identify errors whiles one person was using it. The application was projected for all to see. Through team work we were able to spot issues that needed resolving and did them right there and then. At the end of the day everyone was satisfied because there was input from everyone. The completion ritual for a one week iteration cycle according to crystal was to review our working habits and providing emotional closure. That was achieved today will everyone being satisfied with the output and progress of work so far. We plan to have a post-iteration workshop after delivery to the user who was give us further feedback to work on. The next meeting with the user is scheduled from friday 09-Sept-2011.

Iteration 1 , 2nd Increment - Day 3

Date: 02-Sept- 2011
Meeting time: 11:00am - 1:30pm
Attendance: ALL

Stand up meeting results

Sub-Team A: Having completed the tasks from sub-team B this days activities hinged on the work from sub-team A. They indicated that they have been able to largely complete the search functionalities which was proving difficult. The problems encountered had to do with a control not updating appropriately.

Integration Session
It was agreed that today will be used for final integration of all that has been developed so far. We were able to integrate some pages which was easy using Visual studio. The integration session revealed that though Sub-Team A had done the search function the tasks requested of them was not exactly what they presented - mainly with User interfaces as well as follow of events. The sub team had to therefore go back and redesign their interfaces to match the Task list. Arguments ensued on how the user interfaces and flow of events must be.
We had to go back to the Story boards we created to verify what we agreed on in terms on user interfaces.

With that settled, Durand was tasked to do the modifications. Edward opted to stay and help him out. The other team members were left to keep working on PART A and the Literature Review of the entire Project.

Close of Day: Before close of day, the two were able to do all modifications and integrate the changes into the final system. 

Iteration 1 , 2nd Increment - Day 2

Date: 31-Aug-2011
Meeting time: 11:00am - 3:00pm
Attendance: ALL

The day begun with a Stand-up meeting in which both sub-teams presented

1. What they have done since yesterday
2. What they plan to do today
3. What their challenges were

Stand-up meeting results

Sub-Team A: Working on the Customer Details page and search functionality, the team indicated they have been able to make head way with regards to the Search functionality. They plan to tweek it further as well as start working on the Customer details. They still had problems with the results being generated on passing values for search. The search was not working for alphanumeric inputs , only numeric.

Sub-Team B: Working on their last Episode, the front Menu structure, they indicated that was what was left to be done today.

Day's activity: Teams went back to their side-by-side programming to work on the tasks assigned them. There was occasional help provided across teams when needed.

Up until now integration had been done on the Main development machine on which Sub-Team B was working on. Their episodes were easy to integrate into the overall system. Sub-Team A had more challenges with the search functionality and we were working hard to overcome them. That proved to be a major obstacle to performing any integration with the work done by sub-team A. The Visual studio IDE with its east build and test features permitted teams to check if pages and functions were working. These took sometimes seconds to execute.

Close of Day: By close of day the search functionality being worked on by Sub-Team A was working well and they could now move on to the other episodes. The Menu Structure had been completed and would be shown to the end-user for feedback. Final Integration is scheduled for Friday -Day 3

Next Meeting: 02-Sep-2011 11:30AM

Iteration 1 , 2nd Increment - Day 1

Date: 30-Aug-2011
Meeting time: 11:00am - 3:00pm
Attendance: ALL

In todays meeting we begun the 2nd iteration of the 1st Delivery of Customer Management. We started the day with a brief meeting to understand the the Iteration process. According to crystal clear the Iteration Cycle involves having an iteration plan (which we did in our last meeting to identify the tasks to be done based on the feedback received from end-user), Days of work which includes various integrations and episodes.
We divided our selves into the two sub-teams on which we assigned the tasks. We scheduled to have a break after 2hrs then have a Stand-up meeting to review current status, progress and identify problems.

Stand up meeting results:

Tasks Done:

• Create site together with customer
• Prompt user to confirm creation of customer
• Sorting - customer codes and site codes

• Remove Edit /Select from Grid view
• Include Details View

Tasks Undone:


• Modify menu structure - Not yet started
• Customer Search on code and name - Problems found
• Create site for existing customer - Problems found
• Add Correspondence site among customer sites -  Not yet started

Next meeting: 31-Aug-2011 11:00am

SCREEN DRAFTS

Main Menu Screen

Create Customer Page

Add Site page

Customer details page

Search page

Brief meeting on the State of Progress of Part A

Date: 23rd Aug 2011
Meeting time: 12pm - 1:00pm
Venue: Sheppard Library S223
Attendance: ALL

We had decided to meet today according to our project plan to review the work done so far regarding the Part A of the project which involves a literature review and comparison of 4 agile methods.

So far the work on comparison is going well with Durand showing a table of comparison of the 4 methods. He explained he had been able to compare the methods using the Avison and Fitzgerald framework and has discovered more that he will want to add up. Aylin also showed a similar work done with a write-up on the overview of the four methods together with a table of comparison. She however indicated work still needs to be done on the layout and structure of arguments and content.

On MDA/E and history of OOA/D, Edward showed work done so far regarding the history of OOA but also indicated he was far from complete although he was on course. Sara also indicated she had found work done on OMG and MDE although she had difficulties in knowing whether to compare the ideas about MDE from other authors.

In all progress of work was good but more will have to be put in the few weeks. We set friday 26th Aug as the date for the preliminary work on comparison to be presented to Steve via email. The team working on it (Durand and Aylin) will have to forward their work to the team latest friday morning to be emailed to steve later in the evening. We will expect feedback from Steve in this regard.

We could not have any meeting regarding development as originally planned. We have therefore decided to focus the whole week on Part A and resume work on Part B from Tue 30th Sept. Friday to Monday will be Bank holidays and hence library wont be open for access.

Postponed meeting

We had to call off today's meeting and schedule it for tomorrow due to heavy rains. 

Method Review and Discussion, Iteration Plan

Day: 17-Aug-2011
Meeting time: 11:00am- 2:50pm
Venue: Sheppard Library S223

After the successful delivery of our walking skeleton it was imperative we started to now work our way into Crystal clear and try to understand the terminologies and the process not forgetting some of the strategies and techniques suggested by the author.
We begun the day with a presentation and discussion on the general idea behind Crystal Clear led by Edward.
In the discussion we looked at the:

Properties, Strategies, Techniques and Work Products or the Crystal Clear method.

7 Properties have been described by the author

• FREQUENT DELIVERY
• REFLECTIVE IMPROVEMENT
• OSMOTIC COMMUNICATION
• PERSONAL SAFETY
• FOCUS
• EASY ACCESS TO EXPERT USERS
• TECHNICAL ENV’T WITH AUTOMATED TESTS, CONFIGURATION MGT AND FREQUENT INTEGRATION

We discussed the first 3 which the author mentions as the core of all crystal flavors.
Under Frequent delivery we discussed the terms Integration,  Iteration, Release, User Viewings and the difference between an Increment, and Delivery and a Iteration. From our discussions we concluded an tiny bits of increment form part of an iteration.

We also touched on what the author means when he makes mention of Strategies such as Exploratory 360 degrees which we have been practicing unknowingly in a smaller scale. other strategies are:

• Early Victory: How to attack problems: Worst thing first or Easiest Thing first, Business Value 
• Walking Skeleton:  Tiny implementation of the system 
• Incremental Architecture:  Changing design and architecture iteratively
• Information Radiators

Techniques we may be looking at are:

• Methodology Shaping:
• Reflection Workshop: 
• Blitz Planning:
• Daily Stand-ups
• Side-by-side programming
• Burn Chats

The process cycle was also discussed to understand the structure of the whole project according to crystal clear, what constitutes an Delivery , Iteration, Integration, and an Episode

Process Cycle showing Project, Iteraion, Day, Intergation cycles (Alistar Cockburn)

Finally the Work Products discussion revealed some roles and and documentation expected by each role. These roles were something some team members were already implicitly doing so it was quite clear who had which role 

The Sponsor : We identified as Steve

Co-ordinator: Edward

Business Expert: Sara
Lead Designers : Aylin, Edward

Designer and Programmers:  Aylin, Durand, with all inclusive programming

Tester: Sara

Writer: Durand

Breakdown of results from Method review

The Second Half of the Meeting we held a Reflective Workshop for the first time following the Keep/Try Reflective workshop. Making use of colored stickers we all came up with things we do we should keep, problems we having and things we should try 

The Final part of the Meeting was to discuss the changes requested by user and do an Iteration Plan. After a long debate and arguments about user interface and what the user meant on his requests we finally settled on the changes requested, grouped then into tasks and assigned tasks to two sub-teams who will perform side side programming in order to come up with an integration.

Changes Requested by User

Changes separated into tasks based on user interfaces

ITERATION 2 – TASKS BREAKDOWN

USER INTEFACE	MODIFICATION TASK	ASSIGNED TO
Main Page	·        Modify menu structure        ·        Include Add site link        ·        Customer search link	Edward and Sara
Create Customer Page	·        Create site together with     customer        ·        Prompt user to confirm creation of customer        ·        Work on Sorting - customer codes and site codes	Edward and Sara
Customer Details Page	·        Remove Edit /Select from Grid view        ·        Include Details View	Durand and Aylin
Search Customer Page	·        Customer Search on code and name	Durand and Aylin
Add Site Page	·        Create site for existing customer        ·        Add Correspondence site among customer sites	Durand and Aylin

Next meeting: Tue , 23-Aug-2011

1st Iteration meeting with User

Date: Tue , 16-Aug-2011
Meeting time: 1:00 pm -2:00 pm
Venue: TG offices
Attendance: ALL

We were able to get our first working system (Walking skeleton) showing just the creation of customer and creation of customer sites

Other outputs include:

• Refined Project Plan
• Refined Use case models

Meeting with use yield useful feedback for system modification.  We will discuss these in our iteration plan meeting

Next meeting: Wed 17-Aug-2011 11:00 am

Iteration 1 , 1st Increment - Day 2

Date: Friday 12-08-2011
Meeting: 11am - 2:00pm
Venue: Sheppard Library Room S223
Attendance: Aylin, Edward

After the first day of design we had problems with some validation issues in ASP.NET which we not able to solve immediately. We had to resort to changing and separating the UI for Customer Creation and Viewing. This enable each page to have its own validation session.

So far we have Created pages for:

Default page- Showing two links

• Create Customer
• View Customers

CustomerPage - 

• Shows a list of all customers
• Ability to Edit, and Select
• view all sites for selected customer
• Add new customer
• Move to previous page

CustomerSitePage -

• Shows a list of all sites belonging to currently selected customer
• Ability to Edit, and Select
• Add new site for selected customer
• Move to previous page

Create Customer -

• Enter name of customer
• Auto generation of customer ID
• Message feedback of created record
• Move to previous page
• Go to View Customers

Create Site for Customer -

• Shows details of currently selected customer
• Enter new site details
• Auto generation of site ID
• Message feedback of created record
• Move to previous page
• Go to View Customers

Iteration 1 , 1st Increment - Day 1

Date: Wed, 10-Aug-2011
Meeting: 11:30am - 3:30pm
Venue: Sheppard Library S223
Attendance: ALL

Agenda:

1. First Requirements review
2. Database design review
3. User interface discussion and drawing on story board
4. ASP.NET and C# discussion and demonstration
5. Start development

Following the meeting with user yesterday we are to tackle Customer Management Increment
Mainly the Creation of Customer, Update of Customer and Creation of Site for Customer Interfaces

We looked at the database design which was already implemented by Durand from the design by Sara.

We took to the story board to manually draw and discussed what the interface should look like

Using the flat screen projector in our meeting room, we were able to demonstrate the use of the Visual
Studio IDE and the creation of ASP.NET website and pages. We all discussed as the development
progressed.

Outputs:

• User Interface design of Customer Creation was working
• User Interface design of Customer site creation - not working  - Reason: Must learn how to pass values from page to page 

Next Meeting: Friday 12/08/11 11:00am to get functionality working

Tasks:
Edward , Aylin, Durand : Find out more about how to pass values and get functionality working

First meeting with Client

Meeting time: 1:00pm - 1:45pm
Venue: EIS offices
Attendance: ALL

We were able to receive feedback from Steve regarding our project plan and our use case and class diagrams.

Client meets with use to inform us of the first iteration and deliverable he will want.
It was to handle the Customer management , creation and updating and probably site creation.

Our next meeting with client is scheduled for next Tuesday

Our next meeting is 10-08-11 to start with development. 

Analysis and Project Plan meeting

Meeting time: 1pm - 2:45pm
Venue: S223 Shepherd Library
Attendance: ALL

On agenda for today's meeting was to review our initial project plan, as well as brainstorm on the analysis.

We begun the meeting by looking at what was needed to be done for a project plan. We identified these stages which every project must follow

1. Definition
2. Planning
3. Initialisation
4. Control
5. Closure

In our definition we looked at our aim and identified the objectives given to us from the briefing

We then went through the Planning phase following these steps

1. Getting the Working Breakdown Structure
2. Time Estimates
3. Milestone identification
4. Activity sequencing
5. Scheduling
6. Replanning

We went through the first four steps to come up with our Task list and Gantt chart which we produced using Microsoft Project 2010. We also found another tool called. Switch .............. but we were not so accustomed to that.

By the end of the meeting we had the following deliverables:

• A draft Project Plan in MS Project 2010
• Initial Use case diagram compare
• The election of Edward to be Team leader of the group

Next meeting: Tue 11am before meeting with Steve at 1pm

Next Meeting Deliverables:

• Class and Use case diagrams
• Project Plan

Next Task assignments

• SQL Server explore :  Durand
• Database schema design: Sara
• ASP.NET / C#.NET prepare: Aylin and Edward

Ongoing Tasks: 

Modern initiatives in software development  - OOA, UML, OMG, MDA (Sara and Edward)

Research on Four agile methods and compare  (Aylin and Durand)

Meeting with Steve

Meeting time: 1:00pm - 1:45pm
Venue: TG office
Attendance: All + Steve

Just from the meeting with Steve to discuss our progress so far. We were able to show him our criteria and justification however there is more work to be done. Project size he discounted, Tools and techniques he would want more in-depth analysis whether we talking about CASE Tools, etc. And generally a whole re-structuring of the criteria chosen. Also taking about XP and DSDM since they were not current methods.The project plan was poorly done and expected more of a Ghantt chart to show. He also talked about us working on the Literature Review  (Part A) alongside Part B. With Part B we could show him next time our database tables and some use cases.

Review of Meeting
2:00pm-2:30pm

We sat to reflect on the response from Steve and realised we had to go back and look through our criteria again. We decided to do away with XP and DSDM and introduce LEAN and FDD

Since we needed to work on Part A we split the tasks amongst ourselves
Sara and Edward are to research on the First part of the Literature Review made up of the OOA, UML, MDE etc history

Aylin and Durand are to keep working on the Agile methods comparison

In addition we are all to keep working on our research regarding UML and come up with use cases and class diagrams concerning the project.

The last task involves learning about Project Planning.

Blitz Planning

Date: 02-Aug-2011
Meeting duration: 12:30- 14:35
Venue: Sheppard Library, First Floor
Attendants: All

Today's meeting was to take new steps after getting our justification ready. We have all done bits of reading on Crystal Clear and though we couldn't finish the book we had a good overview of what was expected of us.

We anticipated our first meeting with client but was still awaiting email confirmation and appointment. We therefore decided to move ahead with implementing the agile method. The first phase was to go through what Cockburn calls the blitz planning. A technique he uses to prepare a project plan.

We followed the technique as described in the book by
1. First individually going through the project brief once again
2. Our of the brief produce set of tasks which we believe will be done during the project about 15min. Ideally we should have had cards of some sort or coloured stickers but we had to resort to using blank sheets of paper.
3. We put all together then gave them time lines by guessing
4. We then sorted them out in terms of priority
5. We chose was is termed the Walking Skeleton (the first functionality which we would like to work on to show the customer. This we noted however may alter when we meet with our client.
The releases we choose are:

•   Walking Skeleton 
•  Project Management A 
•  Project Management B 
•  Project Reporting  

A more detailed plan of the tasks chosen is listed in the group work book.

The meeting ended with us deciding to start looking at the Use cases and Class diagrams in anticipation of meeting with User.

15:00 - We have received reply from user of appointment tomorrow 1pm. This is good news for the group as we can look forward to our first iteration.

Crystal Clear Overview

As part of our steps to employ the use of the Crystal Clear agile method, I am reading through the book we recommended to each other. And so far so good. Good introduction to the book

Justification and Choice

Date: 30-July-2011
Meeting duration: 13:30 - 14:30
Venue: Quadrangle , Hendon Campus
Attendants: All

Today we met again on campus to deliberate on our findings regarding the set criteria to use as out justification. We ended up choosing Crystal Clear as the agile method we will use and listed

1. Customer Involvement

2. Documentation

3. Size and Duration of Project

4. Size of the Team

5. Tools and Techniques

as the criteria to use for justification. This had come about after a long brainstorming session on whether to use the comparison criteria we had chosen earlier or to use another set of criteria we found in the document on "Agile Methodology Adoption Decisions" written by John McAvoy et al. 

Durand was tasked to come up with a summary of the justification which we will present to Steve. 

The next task was then to look re-structure our project plan. That will mean including the full cycle involved in our chosen agile method - Crystal Clear. 

We therefore agreed to go through the Crystal Clear book - Crystal Clear , A Human-Powered Methodology For Small Teams, including The Seven Properties of Effective Software Projects written by Alistair Cockburn. Each member of the group was do gain a thorough understanding of Crystal Clear and propose steps we have to follow based on their understanding. 

Our next meeting was scheduled for Tuesday 2nd August 12:30pm on Campus. 

Our planned meeting with Steve was said to be Friday 5th August i.e if he is available. 

Brainstorming session

Today met with group members to try to find a good set criteria upon which to base our justification for choose a particular agile method. No conclusive decisions suggested. We have had to take to reading in the book "Agile Methodology Adoption Decisions: An Innovative Approach to Teaching and Learning" suggested by Aylin.

Duration of Meeting: 7:30pm - 8:30pm
Venue: On-line (Skype)
Outputs: Further reading