SE511 - Week9 - Post2

Tonight I started working on updating Team D's design documents to reflect the final design for PA3. I sent out a response to Ed's email on Continuous Development and continued reading the text books. The PA3 project has some issues and is throwing exceptions. Additionally, the sound functionality isn't working. There was a large Skype thread going on this weekend about the project, but not much on the class Wiki or blogs.

SE511 - Week9 - Post1

The PA3 Tetris project is starting to stress me out a bit. Throughout the project, I've been experiencing communication problems and that are preventing progress to occur.

I met with Sebastian (Team G), Shiloh (Team D, but Tetris main lead), and Shalini (Team E) on Skype tonight and we worked out a lot of details. I discovered that some of the communication was occurring outside of the normal channels of the Wikis and I was out of the loop on some design decisions. Of course, the things I was unaware with affect my team's implementation. The Game object was a missing piece for the HUD, but I found out tonight that there is a Game System that will handle the next block, current block, speed of the block, etc. Sebastian took on implementing and merged this tonight so now we should be able to move forward. Team D's HUD implementation also needed the method names for the GameState::getStateType(), GameState::getLevel(), GameState::getLineCount(), and GameState::getScore() methods from Team F, but these methods were posted late last night.

Up until tonight, I have monitoring Perforce, sending emails to the Team Leads through the Wiki, and monitoring blogs to try to get the kinks worked out. Hopefully we can get the HUD merged to the mainline by tomorrow night.

As I've said before, it will be interesting to see how this all pans out.

SE511 - Week8 - Post3

Team D has our weekly Tuesday night Skype call tonight. I need to follow up with Team F and Team C to see what methods we need to call for the HUD t update levels, lines, scores, and the next block information. Hopefully we can get the information that we need to wrap up the implementation by Thursday so Kofi can write unit tests by Saturday.

SE511 - Week8 - Post2

The Tetris team leads discussed meeting on Skype tonight at 9 PM to discuss the design. However, Shiloh and I were the only two online.. I posted some design questions/requests on Friday night for the other teams. I received replies for what Team D is looking for so hopefully we won't run into integrating the HUD with the rest of the design. It should be interesting to see how this pans out.

SE511 - Week8 - Post1

Tonight Team D had a 1.5 hour meeting to go over our Tetris HUD design and come up with a list of questions for the other teams. We assigned our roles for the Tetris project and posted them at: https://sites.google.com/site/se511globalsoftwaredevw2011/team-d-tetris-task-list.

I posted a thread on the class Google Groups for Team F and Team C to verify if they plan on having accessor methods for variables that we'd need access to. I created a UML diagram for the HUD design and posted it on our Wiki page at: https://sites.google.com/site/se511globalsoftwaredevw2011/team-d-tetris-hud-design-documentation
This page also has a brief description of the methods and an action item list for following up with the other teams.

The iPhone app for my SE591 capstone class, Block Slider, was released on the Apple App store today. If I have any readers, go check it out because it's a free download:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/block-slider/id417852324?mt=8

SE511 - Week7 - Post3

Now that Team D has chosen the HUD feature set for the partitioning project, I went ahead and linked the class master list to our Wiki page. I created the appropriate Tetris design Wiki pages. Team D has a Friday night meeting to discuss our design for Saturday's deliverable due date, but I'm hoping we can get thing started before then since we don't have much time. It's going to be interesting to see how this assignment pans out.

SE511 - Week7 - Post2

Today at work, I attended a forum given by Wayne Turmel called "How to Create and Manage Remote Project Teams.  The forum tied into what we're covering in SE511.  Wayne is a speaker and author that focuses on his work on managing teams and communicating online. He has a podcast called the "Cranky Middle Manager Show" and his blog on BNET.com is covers topics related to managing remove functional project teams.

I found the forum to be interesting. Wayne focused on being a human and having interaction with people.  One example he gave was about a project where part of a team was in New York and another was in India and it wasn't working very well.  On one Friday, a team member posted on a blog that they were done for the day and was leaving to go have grandma's famous chili.  This spun into a whole discussion and trading of recipes where eventually team members were even asking "by the way, how is your grandmother".

The point of this was to reduce the spoke of one-on-one only communication and getting team members to communicate with one another. Likewise, communication shouldn't only occur when people needs things. This helps break down the barriers of us vs. them.

I didn't expect that this 1.5 hr. forum would be about this and I think it was good for everyone to hear this and step back and think for a minute.  With focus on reducing costs, faster schedules, etc., people start to throw out being nice to one another to get the job done.

From my own experience, I work with people in Mexico, Tiawan, and China.  After I travel to these locations, meet the people (so that they aren't just an email or voice that I hear on the phone), share a meal with them, and perhaps share a beer with them, I find that trust is built and we're able to work a lot better together.