Unluckily, our group's problem kicked in the first week because of lacking of manpower. Since there are odd number of students in class, our group was formed with three members only while other groups have four. At that moment, we have been aware of how heavy our work would be. Therefore, we seek for help from lectures and actively looked for the fourth member by ourselves in CS2103T forum at the same time. However, we did not get too many replies from forum, as by that time most students from CS2101 have formed their own groups while other students taking CS2103 are from Engineering Faculty and prefer to use C/C++/C# for the project instead of java. When we feel helpless and disappointed, we found Dr.Bimlesh assigned us the fourth number Faizan Abid surprisingly and then our group leader Darren sent him an email for meeting. He quickly replied us, but unexpectedly again, he is on exchange program in Germany and will only come back after recess week. What's worst, he is good at C programming but not at java. By then we all feel like taking the roller coaster, ups and downs.
Although the problem tortured us for almost three weeks, we did not lose the faith in the project. Instead, we meet up frequently and split the job among three of us. I can see that everyone shows his commitment to the project and positively work for the project design. According to the meeting yesterday, we decided that Darren will work on GUI design alone, Qin Chuan and I will take care of the coding of logic, and Faizan can help us do documentation and testing after he comes back. I believe this decision is an effective solution to the problem, although three of us have to suffer for the heavy workload.
With the solution I described above, we stepped into our coding stage this Thursday. But my own problem kicked in when I started the coding for Venue Assistant. I realized that the information of each venue is fixed, because the name and number of faculties, departments and rooms won't be changed throughout the program. The only thing changing is the schedule of each room. Therefore, the fixed basic information has to be read from a manual written text file, but the rooms associated with schedule objects need to be written in a separate file which will be created during object serialization. I would like to suggest to give each room an unique ID and create a match function, so that room objects can be added back to department list according to the match function during the program startup. I'm also ready to adjust my proposed solution if our group members have a better way to solve the problem.
In conclusion, as the quote says ' The problem is not the problem; the problem is your attitude about the problem'. So far, we all work hard to overcome the problems we faced and have faith in what we are doing. I believe our attitude determines how well we do it, so let's keep it up and fight for our project!
Hi Zhang Xi,
ReplyDeleteI agree that there is a lack of manpower in the project group. However i feel that we did not let this small problem affect us in any major ways.
We had decided to tap on the specialization of all the current members in order to minimize the problem posed by the manpower crunch.
I believe this demonstrate the adaptability that our group have and this will be a important skills that we need to have when we go out to to work. This is because not everything will go according to our wish and expectation in reality and we need to change according to different requirements.
Hi Zhang Xi,
ReplyDeleteThe success and scope of a project is heavily dependent on the strengths and capabilities of the members involved in the project. Therefore, the more members one team has, the more strengths and capabilities a team can portray assuming that every member's strengths and capabilities are more or less unique from one another.
In terms of manpower shortage, one person's capabilities can be equal to two or more people's capabilities. In our case, having faced with the challenge of implementing this project without less one member, we were still able to pull off many tasking within this short amount of time. Hence, this just goes to show that our individual capabilities were able to cover up for the absence of one more team member.
In conclusion, I feel that no matter what hardships that may come our way, our team will be able to overcome it with each and every one of our unique abilities.