November 28, 2007
Prototyping
We spent today working mainly together, towards creating a nice interface for the final prototype we’re preparing. This involved mainly CSS styling of the Flex Application and components, as well as sizing up panels and components as they should appear in each section.
I also looked at some 3rd party flex components to see what kind of things could be done. Links to some examples are in the project discussion section on the Sharepoint.
November 23, 2007
Here’s a nice list of Flex Webapps
November 23, 2007
Functional Spec
Today we finished our (hopefully) final draft of the Functional Spec and sent it to Howard.
We updated the operational scenario diagrams and added a diagram of the data model we have conceptualised.
We also gave it a final proof read and changed some of the wording.
Development
We have forgotten how to develop! After all the functional spec work it has been hard to move our mindset back in to the development. Today we’ve been focussing on development of the UI for prototypes and ideally the production product too.
Found this interesting Flex Interface Guide
November 23, 2007
Meeting with Howard
Our meeting with Howard today was primarily discussing the functional spec. We also spoke a bit about our meeting with DM last week, which reinforced the idea of prototyping as our best approach.
We aim to have a final draft of the functional spec for Howard tomorrow, so we took note of his suggestions from today.
Functional Specification
We took Howard’s suggestions on board and set about trying to get the functional specification finished. Part of this was to overhaul the requirements section, bringing it up to date. I drew up a summary of the requirements in excel and we included this as a table at the beginning of the requirements section.
I also drew up some high level diagrams of the system architecture for section 4, and some DFD’s for section 5.
Tomorrow we need to update the Operational Scenarios, and include a data modelling section.
November 16, 2007
Meeting with DM
We had quite a lengthy meeting with DM today, showing him our prototypes to date, and trying to nail down some requirements for the Functional Spec.
Prototypes
The runthrough with the prototypes was quite smooth, showing examples of 2 types of products, those which cannot be completed online, and those which can. This led nicely onto getting requirements for other products in each category, and we believe now have the final list of products for the delivery of the production system. Further products can be added in the future naturally.
This new requirements information will help us to complete that section of our functional spec, a final copy of which we hope to send to DM next week.
DM introduced us to a new service BestAdvice, which is simalar to adviserplus that I’ve mentioned before, they claim to provide a ‘feed’ by which they might mean API or similar means for us to generate quotes.
November 16, 2007
DM has never been involved in a software project before and traditional requirements gathering is therefore not easy.
We decided that a good way to illicit his requirements and desires was to produce prototypes of each area of functionality. He can then explicitly see what he likes, what he doesn’t like, and extra functionality he would like to see provided.
So far, we have prototyped a subsection of the Shop Front and a sample screen from the Customer Management System.
It has proved useful as it has gotten him talking about how certain processes should take place, where before he may have just spoken about how the website should look or who it should appeal to.
November 16, 2007
Meeting with Howard
Our agenda for today’s meeting was as follows:
We spent most of the meeting running through our functional spec draft.
After which, we had asked Howard to give us a ‘Critical Assessment’, simply an external look at our project. It was his opinion that we very much need to nail down the requirements aspect of our functional spec as this is the ‘contract’ according to which our system will be delivered. Our system should therefore satisfy all of the requirements as listed. If it does this then we have fulfilled our commitment to the project.
Howard also suggested a blog post on why we’re using prototyping in the requirements phase. That’s the next post.
November 16, 2007
I upgraded my laptop RAM from 512mb to 2gb, this should hugely speed up development and build times!
November 14, 2007
We sent off a draft of the functional spec to Howard ahead of tomorrow’s meeting. We just have a few sections outstanding so wanted to get some feedback for what’s currently there. Hopefully we’ll get that sealed off well in advance of the deadline, Friday 2 weeks from now.
November 14, 2007
Today was spent mostly on Functional Spec, particularly the Gantt chart.
We managed to plan up until February, I proposed we have a sample prototype system running by Christmas, which Dermot can test (UAT) until after the exams. After this period, requirements will more or less be fixed and we can work on converting the prototype system to production.
