Homework #20 - 10/29 (Makeup)

Deliverable 3:

     To be honest, I don't even remember what was going on with my circumstances around the time of deliverable 3. My group basically functioned entirely without me for this one. I feel like I definitely dropped the ball during this part of the semester. I remember Ian showing me the code and walking us through it as a group. I also remember suggesting that we should implement a time stamp attribute to keep track of when the test cases were run. Even though our set of test cases were run basically at the same time, or at least with very little time in between each, it wouldn't matter much for our class project, but in a real world setting, information about who ran the test, and when it was run would also want to be recorded. Other than that, Ian pretty much wrote the entire framework, and Andrew wrote the entire deliverable. I'm not sure what Tan was working on at the time.
     In a sense, I suppose we divided up our group sort of like the surgical team described in the Mythical Man Month, with Ian being the main surgeon. Andrew and I were mainly bookkeepers and Tan ended up filling a dual role of the surgeon's right hand man, and also the public relations person, since he wrote the front end of our application, which would communicate the information to the client. In our case, however, the group suffered from more disorganization than anything else. Normally, the division of tasks among group members is to increase the total efficiency, but in our case it probably hindered us more than doing us any good. It is very much similar to how Brooks describes some systems being developed by large teams: programmers are usually in charge of not only the implementation, but also the design of their components of the system. In this sense, you get several components that are not designed in a unified manner. This was the case in our group as well, I think. We had basically one person writing the framework, so the others might not have fully understood the design. Unfortunately, that includes those of us who wrote the actual deliverables - so some of the information conveyed could have likely been incorrect as it was not fully understood in the first place.

After hearing that we did pretty much a horrible job on this deliverable, I committed myself to putting a lot more effort into the team and our future deliverables.