Olivia Morganett
Team Lead and Programmer
Team Lead and Programmer
On Monday, January 30, the team met with Don Fishback and James Hughbanks of ODDS. During this meeting, we exchanged contact information, determined that we would meet every other week on Wednesdays at the ODDS office, and discussed the goals of the project. It was determined in this meeting that our main objective was to optimize the database calls while enhancing the user experience. We have set up our next meeting to be Wednesday, February 8 to discuss the design scope and further determine project milestones and deadlines. I have made additional progress by editing and filling the empty website to match what has been discussed in our meeting. Lastly, the company has set up an Asana account for project management in which all team members have joined.
This week we received ssh access to the pre-existing source code and mySQL database of the website. I started looking through the code to familiarize myself with what exists and how it functions. Additionally, I have been re-familiarizing myself with MySQL, PHP, and HTML/Bootstrap, while also trying to learn JQuery, a language I have not used before. On Wednesday, February 8th, the team met with Don Fishback and James Hughbanks at their office. During this meeting, we nailed down the project requirements and discussed possible designs. We have narrowed down between two designs, and will be creating mock-ups of these designs over the next week, and will send them to the customer on February 17th and further discuss and decide on a design in a meeting on February 22nd. As team leader, I have been in charge of taking notes during meetings, editing and filling this website with all of the discussed information, updating the Google calendar, and communicating with the business. Since we have not yet begun to code as we are making sure to nail down project requirements and design, a lot of what I have been doing is logistics, ensuring that meetings and communication are effective, the project is planned out, and all updates are documented. I have also begun hand drafting possible designs for the website and will help code these design prototypes next week.
This week I updated the project website with the suggestions given by Dr. Piwowarski, including adding screenshots of our starting screens and linking information about the HighCharts plugin. Additionally, we had a team meeting on Wednesday, February 15 to discuss the plans for a couple of prototypes requested that we will be sending to them on Friday, and discuss in a meeting next Wednesday. The customer will decide which of these prototypes for the design they like best before we move forward with the project design as a whole. After our meeting, Christian and I worked on and finished the iPhone-like folder prototype using Bootstrap, jQuery, and CSS. This prototype was the bottom dock menu that brings drop-up folders with all the chart selections that the customer initially requested, but we are also trying out a drop-down menu prototype, similar to a Microsoft Word menu design, which Devin is working on. I also scheduled our meeting to review our midterm presentation with PresentationU for February 27th at 12:00.
During this week, we have focused all of our attention on nailing down the project design so that we can get started coding, and creating our midterm presentation. We had a meeting with the customer on Wednesday, February 22nd to nail down the design. It was in this meeting that the customer decided to combine the two prototypes we made into one, and move forward with that as our design. In this meeting, we also found out that we will be creating the full menu bar, but will only need to worry about the functionality for the Charts menu option. This is relieving as we were worried that we would not have enough time to complete the full functionality of the entire menu bar. During this week, I also completed the design document for our project which can be found on our webpage under Design in the Project tab. Lastly, I created the beginnings of our midterm presentation and we met on Sunday, February 26th to complete the midterm presentation and prepare for our PresentationU appointment on Monday, February 27th.
This week we met with PresentationU to practice our midterm presentation, and afterwards we made the suggested changes to our slides. Additionally, we practiced our parts again as individuals and a group based on the feedback and made some small changes. We also met with Dr. Piwowarski to discuss our midterm status and feel like everything is going well. This week, I also made a few changes to our requirements page and design page to reflect our recent changes and decisions, as well as update with screenshots of the latest screens we have from merging the two prototypes together as the customer requested. We will continue to put most of our focus on the midterm presentation until we present on Monday, March 6th.
We met with our customer on March 8 to discuss our current progress on our project and show them our combined design prototype. The customer was very pleased with the progress we had made and approved of our final prototype. Now, we will finish up the final details on the prototype and begin implementing the functionality of the "Charts" option. They noted that the bare bones design we have is what they want us to keep so that they can later mold it to fit their website, so we will not be making it look "prettier" than it already is. We also have scheduled our next progress/status meeting with our customer for March 29th at 1:45 pm. I did not have internet access over spring break and therefore was not able to work on the project any. We plan to meet as a team sometime before our next customer meeting to knock out a lot of the current work.
This week we discussed our game plan going forward as a group. Since we have a meeting planned with our customer for next Wednesday, March 29th, we want to have at least the ticker search feature working where you can search and click on a ticker and a basic stock graph appears. For this week, I have focused on starting writing our testing document and will continue to focus on that until it is done, while Devin and Christian work on coding the previously mentioned functionality. I have also been a liaison between the customer and our team for any technical questions we may have as we continue to code.
We had a meeting with our customer on Wednesday, March 29th to show them the progress of our work. This meeting did not go as planned and we would like to have a discussion with Dr. Piwowarski on Monday during our testing meeting to discuss some present issues with our customer. This week, my main focus was starting and completing the full testing document which can be found under the "Project" tab by selecting "Testing". Additionally, I went through and updated our calendar with all meetings, deadlines, and each week's focus for the project. We have planned our next customer check-in meeting for Wednesday, April 12th at 1:00pm, which we hope will go better than our last one.
This week we had our testing review and status meeting with Dr. Piwowarski. After this meeting, I made the changes we discussed to our testing plan. I also started working on the final report this week and got about halfway through that, making changes to the previously written requirements and design plan, as necessary. We then met as a team on Saturday, April 8. During this meeting, I completed all parts of the final report with Christian's help that could be done up until this point while Devin continued coding work on the project and documented the existing code in preparation for Monday's code review.
This week I worked on completing the final deliverables. I finished up some updates to the final report, which is now completely finished with all information up until now. I began and completed the final presentation that we are going to show Dr. Piwowarski on Monday, April 17 during our practice time in Marksbury. Additionally, I both downloaded the HMTL files of our project webpage, and copied and pasted all of the information over to a word document to be turned in at the end of the semester. We also had our final progress meeting with our customer on Wednesday, April 12 where we discussed minor tweaks and improvements that can be made for our project and planned our product delivery meeting tentatively for May 3rd at 9AM.
This week I made changes to the final presentation based on our practice in Marksbury on Monday and Dr. Piwowarski's suggestions. I also worked on the final status assignment. Additionally, I made some edits to the final report for our project and set up the flash drive that all of our deliverables will be put on. I also updated the download of the project website. Lastly, I reviewed and practiced my portion of the final presentation that I will be talking about on Monday to make sure it went smoothly.
This week we had our final presentation in Marksbury which we think went well and think our practice helped a lot. I also put the final updates and finishing touches on the final report and team website. I also have collected all the final deliverables and uploaded them to a flash drive to be turned in on May 3rd and have prepared the final report to be printed out.