Week 7 - "Requirements doc, design patterns, and lunch. Oh my!"

"The lightbulb was not invented by continuously reinventing the candle." - Unknown

I thought that I would start you all off this week with a great quote that my former boss posted on his Facebook. Whether he made it up himself or found it somewhere, the world may never know. Either way, it describes an excellent philosophy.

Week 7 has consisted of the following activities:

• The creation and completion of a full requirements document.
• The writing of a full and in-depth analysis of the student-survey responses obtained thus far.
  
• Two meetings with Chris, our resident Cocoa Touch expert.

Our requirements document was created by pooling resources from three central documents: the survey analysis, our focus group interviews, and the initial project proposal to the CREU. Seeing as we had three team members and three core documents, it was a relatively easy decision to take the "divide and conquer" approach to data mining all of these documents. Each of us made a separate requirements document, using only the information available in the sole document which was assigned to that person. These documents were then combined into one large spreadsheet, where they were sorted and edited appropriately. Our requirements document follows the standard format; we have functional and nonfunctional requirements, and the standard subcategories of nonfunctional requirements. Additionally, we prioritized each requirement on a scale of 1-3. The scale was as such:

• 1: This requirement shall be fulfilled by the end of the summer.
• 2: This requirement is a priority, but not a core portion of the system. If possible, this requirement shall be fulfilled by the end of the summer.
• 3: This requirement is outside the original scope of the project, and shall likely be fulfilled after this summer and possibly by a different team of individuals.

As it turned out, most of our nonfunctional requirements were 1's, while many functional requirements tended to be 2's. This is so we can focus on fulfilling the core requirements of the system which are needed to make the system usable and valuable (such as whiteboard-marker to iPad transmitting and zooming in). After we are confident that these core requirements are fulfilled, we can begin to work on the 2's. These are mostly functional requirements that will enhance the experience for the user, but are not necessary for product deployment. We anticipate that many of these requirements will be added, particularly ones that pertain to coloring.

Aside from the requirements doc, we got a few one-on-one tech talks with Chris. We were able to ask Chris to demonstrate certain iOS development concepts which we felt we did not have a solid grasp on. Seeing a live demonstration certainly helped to solidify our knowledge of these concepts. Additionally, we have plans to meet with Chris again next week for one or more two hour blocks. Since we are able to explain our project goals from an engineering prospective to Chris before his demonstrations, he is able to gear his information towards our specific needs. This makes our meetings with him much more efficient than say, reading generalized online tutorials.

Oh yeah, we still have interviews lined up! We're hitting up the physics department, and they've been giving us a great response. We have plans to interview at least three physics professors here at RIT in the upcoming weeks.

Until next week...

- Alex