The project SCHEMESTATION has started fairly well; the project itself is demanding and so far the morale of the project group has been enthusiastic. The planned schedule is aggressive but a necessity for a successful project. The group has done lot of work in these first few weeks; definition and design work is well underway, even some implementation work has begun.
There has been some minor difficulties with the group dynamics; this group has no previous experiences in working together as a team so there was no established conventions for teamwork. Also the project related role responsibilities were a little obscure at the beginning (eg. project manager vs. process manager) but these problems have been resolved by precise definition of the roles and responsibilities.
So far the tight scheduling has been rather successful. The creation of the project plan required a bit more team co-operation than expected.
The project startup required setting up a machine (schemestation.cs.hut.fi) to host the development and communications including mail (group mail alias), news (project internal information) and www (public project information). The setup of development environment (including version control, backup) and documentation system has also been successful. The development environment setup required implementing some development libraries (for debugging and development support) and source tree setup and configuration.
Project (course) related documentation for phase PS has been produced (project plan, requirements definition, progress report).
The overall definition and design of the system has been sketched (see the project plan); the system has been divided into subsystems. Each subsystem has a manager who is responsible of the internal design and development of a subsystem. Common interfaces are all under supervision of a single person to avoid conflicts. Tasks accomplished:
Before the initial implementation work begun a document concerning coding conventions was produced. Although implementation work has begun, the quality assurance and testing methods are still under consideration (eg. there has been an agreement on usign pre- and postconditions for public interface functions) and the final documentation concerning these things has been scheduled.