Senior Project Reflections 1: Following the Life Cycle

Chirp… Chirp… Welcome back everyone, it took me a bit longer than anticipated to write this but I am somewhat glad that I took the extended break.

If you like excuses then heres mine: I took an introduction to philosophy class because I somehow skipped a general credit elective in the process of earning my degree in Computer Science. The reasons behind taking a philosophy class instead of something else include the fact that philosophy is interesting to me (due in part to me being a Christian and growing up enjoying discussing theology) and also because I find the philosophy behind Artificial Intelligence(AI) research very intriguing but was somewhat ill-equipped as to how to approach it. I also enjoy hearing other peoples perspectives because it allows me to understand what I believe better and to better round out the sharp edges in my beliefs. At any rate It was a very interesting class and I am very glad I took it, I really enjoyed discussing metaphysics and the aspects of AI with my classmates (it was an online class so by “discussing” I mean online forum posting). So the excuse is that this class along with working full time took pretty much all of my time and I didn’t have much left for writing and “reflecting”.

However, now that I have had all of three months to think about software engineering I am finding that the break gave me a good opportunity to distance myself from the biases of the project and do a fairer analysis of my senior project. So hopefully you will enjoy it as well.

I’ve decided to post several reflections of different parts of my Senior Project. So here is the first part with an undetermined number to follow:

When beginning to reflect on my senior project a specific incident came to mind, I was sitting at a Starbucks listening to some marketers talk about their boss and clients and how they disliked them. The end result (from my perspective at least, since they never actually stated this) was that they didn’t enjoy working as a team since everyone had unreasonable and unachievable requests. I can and will discuss some other aspects that I found interesting about the marketers discussion, for now however, I am going to focus on the aspects of team building and one way that I found life-cycles can encourage quality team development. I realize I have discussed my teams life-cycle model before in my post “The Importance of Risk” but I hope I am bringing to light a different aspect of the model here.

One of the things that I found absolutely amazing about my senior project team was in the weekly meetings that we had together. We would usually get together on Saturday’s outside of class and work on our current and next iteration of our cycle (we were using the win-win spiral model), but in these meetings (and throughout the whole class) we never had a project manager, a project lead, or a born leader. Every meeting we would get together and discuss things and at some point someone would go up to the white board and begin facilitating and organizing the discussion. This facilitator would differ from week to week and they never lead the discussion but simply organize what we where all saying so that we could find the finishing point of that meeting.

The nice thing about doing things this way is that it avoided the standard “group project syndrome”, where one person would become a self assigned leader, and a couple of people would do all the work and couple of people would do virtually nothing. This type of group seemed pretty consistent in all of my previous projects and seems to be a natural way for groups to form because of the natural desire for a leader. One major problem with this “group project syndrome” type of group is that it results in very little team gelling and causes people to end up on very large critical paths by themselves. This results in a dangerous type of project that may never have an “end”.

However one of the beautiful things of software engineering is the invention of various types of life-cycle models, this makes working on projects so much easier because in “modern” life-cycle models the model itself can be the project lead, and the members of the team can simply be peers trying to work out problems and collaborate while following the model. If used effectively and actually followed life-cycle models can lead to wonderful end results with very gelled teams¹. To some extent this happened with our team on the CBAA project, we would get together let the life-cycle model be the leader and then collaborate on the discussion of what needed to happen next according to the life-cycle model. Not having a person as a leader was a very important aspect that allowed our team to gel really well, no one was distinct or “special” in relation to anyone else which allowed there to be very little conflict over ideas and design issues.

By using the life-cycle model as the leader and collaborating with a team to come to a conclusion I was suprised by how many meetings ended with everyone agreeing and verbally saying “well its going to be tough but I feel good about it and I think we can actually accomplish this” and every meeting I left feeling very in sync with everyone else. This helped us to all know the direction that not only others were going but also the direction that the team was going as a whole. We certainly had things we could have improved on, many things actually, but I think that for only having a single semester we were able to accomplish quite a bit of positive team gelling through this collaborative effort and treating the life-cycle model as the leader.

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1 – Tom DeMarco in his book The Deadline points out that although it goes against common business practice it is actually quite beneficial to keep well gelled teams togethor rather than separate them. The benefit being that once they are gelled they are much more able to begin projects in a good way rather than a rocky way, since they are already gelled and comfortable with each other.

The Importance of Risk

    One of the hardest parts of a project for me is at the very beginning, getting started.  The start of a project represents an awkward and yet immediate transition from what do I know about the project and, what do I need to know.  What you do know is generally what your client, customer, or manager just told you about the project: “I need a humdinger that will zoom, zip, and fly.”  This, however, is where the awkwardness comes in, you now know what they think they want, the difficulty comes in translating that into a final product down the line.  And so naturally as a software engineer you start to ask questions about the product.  This is the start of finding out what you need to know, what the client means by “humdinger” and how exactly “zooming” and “zipping” relate to it. 

    This transition is a hard one because you begin with, most likely, a very vague understanding of what the client wants and its your responsibility to take that understanding and materialize it while they watch.  But all you have is a vague statement, so what does the final product actually look like? what does it really do? who are all of the stakeholders?  This all translates into a simple question of the scope of the project, and more importantly of version 1.0. Tied neatly into this question of scope is the whole bundle of what you and your teammates are as software engineers going to be doing until that 1.0 arrives and the client signs off on it.

    Scope, to me, is a scary thing, it defines not only the final product but more than likely it heavily impacts the core of your technology.  If you decide that these certain features are not going to arrive until 2.0 then you have to make sure that 1.0 is going to fulfill the architectural qualifications of allowing those features to be built in later.  Scope represents what you need to consider along the way of getting to 2.0 while you’re really just working towards 1.0.  This is where risk comes in, in my opinion to save the day.

    So, as I sit there with my teammates questioning what it is exactly the client wants and what I need to know in order to deliver it, risk starts popping up.  What if I don’t understand the client, the product, my responsibility, and so on.  Then reason and “project” kicks in and you start to look at your life cycle options.  Risk based life cycle models like the spiral or more refined win win spiral are excellent at starting projects appropriately.  More than likely all projects will start with some sort of problem of scope, meaning “what exactly was the client talking about?”.  With other life cycle models you may start with feasibility (waterfall), or some other standard starting point, or some other general direction.  But with risk based life cycle models you are immediately addressing the concerns that you face with the product.  If you understand the product but have another risk, then you can gladly and rightly start with this.

     This is where solace enters into the start of a project, because with other models you may have a place to start, or not, with risk based models you can immediately start to deal with the things that make starting a project so difficult.  If the team says “what exactly is a humdinger?” and that’s the largest risk, that’s where you start.  If the team says “I understand the product, but the timeline is too short” then you can start with reasoning out version 1.0.  Of course working with other models will certainly work, I would say that time has proven that using any number of models, including risk based, will work.  But one of the nicer aspects of risk based models is that instead of concerns on the backburner until the model allows time for it, with risk based models it can be immediately addressed.  This allows for a nice amount of stress to be dropped at the beginning of a project.

    – Legit