CS467 (Capstone) - Luke's Take

A team can achieve powerful things when they begin to work in unison.

The last few days my team’s repository was setup and now the first PRs are starting to come through. Generally, the capstone project has been frustrating start to me. Our team wasted a good week with indecision.

However, we are starting to formulate ideas of how to move forward with our project. And all of the sudden features and creativity are starting to flow.

A synergistic team is like a snowball rolling down the mountain. At first the snowball is insignificant and unnoticeable but after some time the snowball gains a momentum that is impossible to stop.

In conclusion, I’m becoming less frustrated and beginning to appreciate the power of a team.

Without any clear guidance, a group will not coordinate or develop anything. Someone must take the lead and motivate the team. But to get a team motivated, one must lead not through force but by example.

Our group setup seems fractured and we have been given a blank canvas by our industry rep. This has been somewhat of a shock to most of the group. The lack of direction is causing us to be inactive in developing our project plan. In order to motivate the team, some of us have stepped up and begun to generate ideas for our project. Hopefully, this stepping up will get other members involved to finish the project.

A blank canvas can lead to inactivity in a group project. A remedy for this is someone stepping up and leading by example.

Yesterday, our advisor granted us access to the project code. After we signed NDA agreements. I now have all this code I don’t understand written by previous students, and I have to come up with 4 high level stories by next Tuesday that will map out my entire last term.

I’m a bit overwhelmed. Our project manager says that we can come up with our own requirements. However, I don’t have the slightest clue of what I’ve been given.

Yesterday, I found an instruction .pdf and looked through the main file and some supporting files and functions. Today I was able to get the code running and got most of my environment setup. I decided to use Ubuntu (WSL) as my OS and VS code as my IDE. I’m working with Python so I had to make sure I had python3 installed and also pip for importing the right dependencies from a requirements.txt file.

I also found that I needed to install a graphics program in addition to the ones the previous students had suggested.

Finally I ran the program and it worked. Now I need to look through the code deeper and explore the theory behind what the code is trying to do. Maybe through this process of exploration some solid user stories will emerge for the assignment that is due on Tuesday.

When a group of strangers are put together to achieve a goal, the process is initially chaotic. From the start looking forward, it is a wonder that an orderly final project will eventually materialize.

This week marks the formation of groups for the Capstone projects. In my particular group we have 5 individuals that live in a variety of US time zones. Each of us have their own lives with families, various work demands, hobbies, children, life difficulties and differing personalities. We also are students and have never tackled such an endeavor.

From all of this chaos, we are expected to achieve our project’s requirements. How is order going to unfold from us five strangers? Can we order ourselves with our various lives and locations to come up with a viable working product? It seems insurmountable right now.

The Team Standards assignment seems to be set before us to help bring order. It will provide a methodology to organize our efforts to build the project, if we setup a proper document and adhere to the Standards that we set.

I’m especially interested in using daily scrum meetings to keep us all on track by asking the questions, “What did I do yesterday for the project?” and “What am I planning on doing today?”. These simple questions will hopefully reveal any blockers on various tasks and allows the group to help.

In addition, I want to have our group do a weekly product meeting. This will help us look at the big picture and make sure our tasks and bugs are getting created and fixed in a proper way and all of the requirements are being met.

I believe we can order our chaotic start and organize ourselves to meet our project’s requirements, but only by following the Team Standards we set both daily and weekly.

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