Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Tute 7

Continuing on with CASE tools today. We're finishing up the remaining activities from the previous tute, which is pretty good. I have done some UML work previously, and it's something that takes a bit of practice to learn I think.

It will certainly be helpful for the assignment, to get a bit of practice doing diagrams. The assignment is one of those ones that seems to get bigger each time I look at it. The questions look simple enough, but the more I learn about this subject, the more I realise how much there is to cover.

And it's all good stuff, I'm actually quite into the subject, if only the lectures were a bit better at Clayton, but the online ones are ok.


Visual paradigm was a pretty good tool for developing UML diagrams. It wasn't quite as intuitive as I would have liked, but i think that with a bit more time and practice I would learn how to work within the program and get exactly ehat I wanted out of it.

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Tute 4

This week we conducted our interview with the tutor, who was standing in for the client Dirk Divot.

We had done our preparation the week before, so we just had to make sure we had our questions ready to go and a plan for how to do the interview.

It went pretty well, with all team members contributing well to both the preparation and the interview itself. This was a pleasant change from other group work in other subjects.
We confirmed our understanding of the system and even discovered a few small new features.

This was a pretty good lab, because we got a good start on the assignment.
The lectures however are not so good. The lecturer is moving through the material far to slowly, and as a result not covering everything.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Tute 3

Today we listened to the podcast from Jason Fried of 37 Signals.
He talked about the development strategies that they used when they were creating Basecamp.
This was very interesting, and presented a well thought out alternative approach to software development.

Their approach emphasized keeping the application as small as possible - referred to as reducing mass - to enable changes and decisions to be made as easily as possible and spending as much time as possible working from the end users perspective. This means starting with creating the GUI and ensuring that the user experience actually meets the requirements rather than spending time developing functional specifications and use cases.

This approach to project management looks like it would enable rapid development and result in a superior product at the end, however it relies heavily on having the right personnel and might be difficult to implement in a larger organisation.

Tuesday, March 6, 2007

tute 2

In todays lab session, se finished up the first activity.
The groups did their presentations on the different aspects of the systems that they ahd chosen.
A few groups did the smae parts opf the system, swhich initially seemed a bad thing, but turned out to be good because it enabled us to see different perspectives on the same parts of the systems.
This demonstrated that there is more than one correct way of analyzing a system.

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Week 1

The first lab session was a bit confusing as we had not yet had a lecture.
This made it difficult to understand the concepts that were being discussed, but after the tutor explained things, it started to make more sense.
Next week hopefully, with more people in the session, things will be more lively.
Aaron