Week 3

To anyone that is reading these lines, welcome to my TechLauncher portfolio! This is the place where I'll be showcasing my involvement in the TechLauncher project I joined in semester 1, 2016. At it's core, "TechLauncher is an ANU initiative which enables students from any discipline to develop the research and professional skills required to use technology to bring great ideas to life and have a positive impact on our society." (Source). 

In TechLauncher, we are required to join a project and develop a software-related solution to a problem. Being an Advanced Computing student myself, my contributions have been programming-related.

This is actually my second semester doing this course. Since we weren't required to maintain a portfolio during the first semester, I shall attempt to provide a brief summary of my project's progress up until now. I'll mainly talk about the problem we are trying to solve, and try to explain the nature of the work we're doing. In future entries, I'll be talking about the project on a week by week basis and mostly focus on my own work, so I would recommend reading this entry, as I'll start assuming that readers are already familiar with what I'm working on in the future.

In any case, let's get started!

A really brief timeline of what was completed in Semester 1 is the following:

Week 1 to 2:  Team selection

Weeks 2 to 4:  High level planning

Weeks 4 to 14: Development of application

Weeks 14-16: Focus group testing

From week 17 up until now: Development of application

About two weeks at the start of the program were spent for allocating students to projects. After this, it took us approximately the same time to organise ourselves and also come up with a high level plan for PairFit, including a product backlog and concrete milestones and goals. We also set up our software engineering environment around this time, and agreed on a weekly meeting time. Some examples of what we did during this time can be seen below.

Moving on, after we finalised our plan with our clients, we started developing our product. We adopted an Agile project management approach, with weekly sprints. During each week, we would take the user stories of our product backlog, break them down to tasks, estimate the tasks and allocate them to the team members. Being able to rapidly establish the project, and coming up with a plan quickly allowed us to start developing quite early. As a result, around the time of week 7, we were able to demonstrate a small prototype during an in class presentation of our projects.

Around week 14, we had to stop developing, since we had to present our progress to a review panel for assessment purposes. In addition, we decided to invite a group of users to test our application, in order to get feedback. This was also the first time that someone external to the team had access to the app. The results were encouraging and verified that we were on the right track. Finally, we were also able to complete our MVP by this time, and took a brief pause from working on the app.

After the focus group, we started ironing out the bugs and fixing aspects of the app that the users considered to be lacking. This was during the end of semester 1, and for the whole duration of the mid year break. In addition, around this time we slightly readjusted our plan, as our clients had come up with new requirements.

And this brings us to semester two. At this point of time, our goal is to refine the graphical interface of PairFit, implement some new features and test the application, in preparation for release.

In the next portfolio entries, I will be going into more detail regarding the project and my contributions to it. This first entry is meant to make the readers familiar with events that have happened over the course of 6 months. I could go into more detail, but this would almost certainly bore users. Instead, I'll provide a collection of some annotated artifacts (such as images and diagrams) that will help provide a better overview of the project. Also, for Android users, the app can be downloaded here. iOS users can send an e-mail to arash@pairfit.com.au to request access to the beta version of the app.