The Project Sandwich

Project Sandwich

Different supervisors have different aspirations for the students they work with. Whereas I have the relative luxury of a hands-off supervisor who steps in when needs be, there are others who run to a tight timetable. One of my fellow students was asked to complete his report in draft form before the start of the Easter holiday. With my project in its current state, I would find such a request difficult to fulfil. There would be some unnatural ordering of events and some presumptuous writing. Having said that, all projects have different demands. Mine’s current demand is bread.

Basically, the general plan of my project has remained relatively intact from the start. That plan can be presented by a prototype sandwich with two slices of evaluation to wrapper it. Given the project will be evaluated during the Easter break (leaving it late? me?) in order to give maximum time for prototype development interleaved with compiling the project report, it is important to get the paperwork done and dusted for said evaluation. This means verification by the Ethics committee. Fortunately, I think I’ve got an idea of what is needed this time. This form of evaluation differs from the survey as it involves the participants using the prototype. I’d want to be a little more ambitious with the testing procedure, however there are limitations to the amount of time to complete the paperwork. However the paperwork in getting sorted and thus bread is in the oven.

The paperwork for ethics took me three days to compile, which followed on from the solution to my Agile methods problem. As some may recall from my previous blog, Agile methods are not targeted to generating the paperwork, merely the end result. However I realised that the methods still require tracking of issues and bugs. I felt this adequately represented the project management taking place. Since ECS provides a clone of the Sourceforge service, it was ready made for tracking issue and bugs. This did require a few days work transferring my thoughts on remaining tasks to the Forge database. The good news is that I’m now well on top of the paperwork, but it also means I’ve not developed any code for a week. Development is something that I’m now looking forward to progressing.