Month: March 2021

During one of the last weeks I want to talk about what I learned throughout this senior design experience. I learned that it is very important to have good communication within the team. If you do not have good communication the amount of work can pile up as well as being focused on what you are good at is also important. Giving out ideas can decrease the amount of time it takes to implement something as well. This also goes a little bit into design. Talking through how you will implement something can create good ideas that will save time as well as making it known how you will implement something so somebody else on the team can make changes to it. Another thing that is very important is being accountable for your work. If one team member doesn’t implement something in the time he is supposed to, it could stall the other team members from completing their own tasks. Not only that but it could make things harder on other team members that are trying to get the project done. I think communication could solve this issue as constantly reminding them to finish their work is partly the whole team’s responsibility. There should be good motivation to do the work from everyone, but the team should help each other out as best as they can, as it is not only one person’s work, but everyone’s as a whole. I learned that relying on other people to do work that needs to be done before some of your tasks is a difficult thing to deal with. That’s why I think it is important to always have things in the backlog that you can do as well as lending a helping hand to be able to accomplish each task. Overall, It was a great learning experience that I will take once I join other teams in the future.

This past week I have worked more with the communication aspect of our project. I have a decent understanding of how it is going to work, but there is a problem of being able to test the communication and especially commands with the actual wave lab. This is because we wouldn’t really know how to verify it is communicating with the lab unless we get in contact with someone on their end who is familiar with this sort of thing. From my understanding there really isn’t anyone with programming knowledge within the lab. We will have to speak with pedro to get that part figured out. Another thing that ties into that is the fact that we have to test the commands that are being sent to the lab. As we don’t want to mess anything up that will slow down the lab researchers, we would need a time slot to be able to test the commands with our web app. That could be a blocker as we don’t really know how open they will be in regards to testing and how often we can test our project. Other than that development has been smooth. I feel I can get my tasks done, but I might be waiting on other team members to finish their parts when it is all said and done. I believe we will need a little bit of time after the term is over to get everything to the point where we can deploy this and the lab researchers can use in replace of their old system. If we didn’t have to rewrite the legacy code I think we would have been done by now which is a bummer. I realized how important planning for these things is, even though it is nobody’s fault we didn’t see this coming. It is also a blocker that there is nobody that we can talk to if we have questions regarding the programming of the system because nobody is familiar with programming that we are working with.