Week 3 already :-(

OK, we have had a pretty busy time over the last few weeks and I haven't posted anything in our "Project Diary" yet. Thought I would fix that with a short first post outlining some of the things I have been looking into over the previous weeks.

Leading up to the start of this subject, Roman, Andrew and myself had several discussions pertaining to both the make up of the team and our first “Project Proposal”. The first proposal was devised by Roman and was to be a Host CRM system. We all thought this was a brilliant idea; however, it was not to be. Both Willy and Daniel came to the conclusion that it was “to hard” and “larger” then anything anyone else had proposed before….During this time we also meet up with another student from CSCI321 to see if we wanted a fourth member. Outcome was we are happy with our team of three. Once our first proposal was knocked back we had two options to fall back onto. One was to select one of the projects proposed by Dr Koren Ward and this was the “User Interface for Evaluating Offshore Oil Riser Pipes”. Given my background as a Mining Engineer, I have had a little bit of exposure to this area, and my current work in writing Software Implementation plans for Interface Design I felt comfortable as well as interested in this topic. However, I have been playing with the idea of using Google’s MapAPI to tracked GPS enabled devices for some time. I raised this idea with the team and they loved it. I hacked together a rough “Project Proposal” which Roman polished up. This was presented to Willy and Daniel and accepted.

Since then I have been looking into the Google Map API’s and several GPS enabled devices. I have also outlined several areas that we need to investigate as part of this project and desired features. We have had weekly meeting at Uni to discuss the progress of our proposal and brainstorm on various ideas and issues. Roman has done a heap of leg work looking into GPS devices and other areas, while Andrew has started the long and “painful” documentation process. At this weeks meeting I have proposed that we review all of the RUP documents that we need to consider, and determine which ones we are actually going to complete, based on them actually providing a positive impact on our project. Based on this, and the RUP process, we can then outline a plan of completing these documents so we can crystallize in our minds what the end product will be.

That’s what I can recall of the last three weeks, I am sure that we have done more…but just can’t recall it all. Will attempt to write more regular entries into our “Project Diary” as I actually do things.

Shawn Ready