My Experiences on Development Methodology Workshop Day II

Well the second day of workshop started with review of previous day's work done.... My group the VMS Solutions group was ready with reviewed class diagram. Our Mentor cum Customer-Mr. Parag Shah reviewed the refined class diagram and gave us the green signal to start the next phase of RUP - the construction phase. We had planned to implement the GUI part of the Visitor Management System which can provide the look and feel of the actual system. We developed one "Visual Basic Form" as a part of this activity. We as a team were very eager to work for this phase as nobody in our team had formal training in VB 6.0. So this was a new learning for all of us. We learnt little bit of how to create classes, functions, GUI forms etc in VB 6.0 and ultimately at the end of the day we were able to implement one tiny funtionality of the system.

In this workshop we also had chance to get hands on experience of Rational Method Composer 7.5(RMC) . It is a tool from IBM Rational which helps the project teams to define/customize RUP process templates according to their requirements. RMC is built upon eclipse enviornment hence it is easy to use and understand. Using RMC, we defined the RUP process templates and prepared the acitivity diagrams for all the phases of RUP viz. Inception Phase, Elaboration Phase, Construction Phase and Transition Phase. This was really nice thing that I can add to my CV :-).

My Experiences on Development Methodology Workshop Day I

The workshop on software development methodology was conducted as part of our curriculum at SCIT.The aim of the workshop was to get the hands on experience of latest software development methodology with small small teams working on small projects.We as MBA SDM students, will be working as Project Managers or Business Analysts or Software Architects in the industry, so understanding of latest development methodologies, the dos and don'ts of these methodologies etc is very important for us to understand . Though all the work carried out during the workshop was far from real scenario in the industry( I m not sure about this) but still it initiated a thought process in us about the development methodologies.

In the beginning of the workshop all teams had to select a product or project as their start up plan. After selecting the "start up", teams needed to work on their project/product using either Agile or RUP development methodology. My team(Dhurva, Rachna, Kshitiz, Roshan, Sandeep) selected Visitor Management System as our start up product and decided to develop it using RUP methodology. We christened our start up as VMS Solutions.

We conceived this start up by sensing the growing need of security systems. The increasing terrorism has made companies to look for more robust and powerful security systems which can keep a close eye on the visitors at their premises.Therefore, we at VMS Solutions proposed to provide a Visitor Management System which can help the companies to store and track the details of visitors at their premises.

On the day I of workshop we executed inception and elaboration phases of RUP methodology. The outcome of these two phases were design artifacts like sequene diagrams, use cases, class diagrams, test plan for unit and functional testing, project plan with time and cost estimates. These things make strong foundation for next phase of RUP i.e. Construction phase.

During the elaboration phase, we also did extensive risk planning. One best thing I like(& found) about RUP is that it calls for early risk planning and solves them early so that they don't become nightmares for the project team in future as the system grows. In our case, there were so many risks which were unidentified.The risk planning involved extensive brainstorming and during this, several times we went "off tangent" from our project scope; but eventually we were able to come back to our main goal after rigourous debates and talks within the group.With our Mentor cum customer - Mr. Parag Shah's guidance(he provided us feedback on our project by wearing customer shoes) we were able to properly identify the risks involved. The risks that were identified were business as well as technical risks hence the system became more robust from technology as well as business perspective. The system is now able to sustain any future requirement from technical as well as business perspective.

During my internship, my project was also exectued using RUP methodology but during that I was not involved in any business risk planning, as a trainee software developer all I could do was look for any technical risks involved. Here in this workshop I was able to see business risks also(though they were very few but were very important!!!).

The design of the Visitor Management System underwent a drastic change after risk planning phase. Thank God we didn't do any coding by this time :-). Now I think that we have done proper thinking and planning to take our the system to next phase of development that is construction phase. This phase will be carried out on the second day of workshop i.e.on 2nd Jaunary 2009 till then Happy New Year :)!!!!