No Motivation

My final year project was going so well in the first few weeks of university - I had my feasibility study done, my project brief looked good, I had a good plan leading up to Christmas - but now I have gotten about 2 weeks behind according to my Gantt chart. I need to salvage my time before it gets any worse.  I'm working doubly hard over this weekend (I'm going to bed now so I can get some good sleep) and I have a nice plan for tomorrow and Sunday I'll play by ear.

It's not like I wanted to get behind schedule.  My project is for a seasonal company and their season is quickly incoming.  I have basics down for the actual coding, but I still haven't finished the design schedule (I'm about halfway through) so I can't really continue until that is finished, but I'm meant to be having daily meetings with the proprietor (as a mini scrum kind of meeting) and then weekly with the proprietor and her partner to show my overall progress, and I'm finding it hard to think of actual programming progress to show them (when there isn't any). It's a real business situation (minus the money) so I should keep it quite professional and stick to the schedule but I'm finding it so hard, especially with other bits of coursework to do before Christmas and copying out my lecture notes in full.  Maybe I've put too much on my plate. I can't wait to have a weekend to relax again.

Fit Criterion

I thought I had completed my Requirements Analysis and Elicitation but then realised I had not added the Fit Criterion into the requirements.

Fit Criterion is the test as to whether the requirement has been successful.  It involves looking really deeply into what requirements you have written and digging really deeply into what they mean and what your customers (the system users) want.  Luckily, my parents are my customers, so I can just ring them up, day or night, and ask them what they want and how they want it to work.  However, writing all of these requirements seem to be taking FOREVER!  It didn't help that while I was writing them that I had a migraine.  That's probably why I forgot to write the Fit Criterion into the requirements to begin with.

Feasibility Studies

I have to say that my Final Year Project is all going off to a rather good start.  I'm currently working on my Feasibility Study for my program.  I'm feeling very business-like.  I've been conversing with my clients (my parents) about the functionality they need/want.  I have a couple of goals set, as well as some 'ultimate' goals (goals to work towards if complete all of the original functionality.

I've also been working on getting the order form on the website working to go live on Friday (4th October, 2013).  I'm currently just working on getting the prices to change when the customer clicks on the 'Quirky Trees' checkbox.  It's taken me an hour and a half roughly to get just one working from an array with html tags inside (I'm using jQuery).  But getting it to change the rest of the prices should be easy now; I'll just implement a for-loop to change the rest of the prices.  In the PHP side of things, I'm just going to have it replace the price part of the string with the correct 'quirky' price.

My lectures started today and, I'm happy to say, I'm very pumped to get this year off to a good start.  My lecture notes have been copied onto Dropbox and tutorials have been completed.  I've already been given my first bit of coursework (other than my final year project) and it's only day 1!

It feels like this year shall be a good one :)

Final Year Project

So today I started working on my Final Year Project.  I'm back in Loughborough now after a wonderful and relaxing summer holiday, but now I'm in full work mode before my lectures have even started!!

At the moment I'm just getting my project management site up and working, along with sorting out all the requirements my customers have given me.  At the moment I am just getting them all down in one place, but I shall be working on analysing them within the next couple of days so they are still fresh in my mind.

My Placement Year

Back in July 2012, I began my first proper paid job as a Student Software Engineer.  I was fresh out of my second year at university and had just finished moving into my own flat.  I wasn't completely alone at work though as a university friend was also starting his placement year there too.

I was going in knowing very little about Object Oriented Programming and not remembering much from what I had learned at university at all.  Luckily I wasn't thrown completely in the deep end and my first couple of fixes were just changing a couple of strings.

Then I got elbow deep in some WinAPI to prevent users from changing the name of a file or folder by left-clicking twice.  At first I thought it was impossible, but by playing around with the system styles and some switch statements I managed to get it to work, along with enabling F2 and right-click->rename to rename the them.

Not long after I started, though, I had to take a couple of months off for what was later diagnosed as Crohn's Disease.  I missed a great chunk of learning in those two months, and always worried about whether I'd have a job to come back to.

I came back and was swapped with my friend from development to testing.  I had only learned some Java and C++ at university, and in my first year too, so being told all of the tests were written in C# was a bit of a shock, but it didn't deter me.  I created many a coded UI test and maintained them in the three months I was on testing.  There wasn't much to testing.

I swapped with my friend again back into development and was put onto the new development project.  The new development was written in C#, like the tests, so I had a little background knowledge of how it all worked.  Along with C#, I had to learn the WPF subsystem and MVVM architecture.  Oh boy.  I didn't learn all of the aspects of it, just enough to get me through the issues.  I dove straight into the deep end of WPF and went about learning to validate text using IDataErrorInfo.  After much searching of the internet and reading of books, I found an answer both the lead developer and I were happy with.

I realised while coding for the new development how important Unit Tests are for a program.

Along with writing code for the new development, I became a whiz at creating UIs with XAML.  I was also given free reign to create an icon for the program, but unfortunately none of my creations were chosen.

Now I'm back in testing, waiting for my tests to finish.  I think I definitely prefer development over testing, but I can appreciate the importance of testing for programs.