Fall '20 Lecture Notes - Mon Aug 31 - Design Principles

Most of this content, including the slides are due to Graham Langdon, who gave a guest lecture on this topic last year. Used with permission. Thanks, Graham!

• slides from Graham (PPTX, PDF)
  • (today we got through the user experience section and stopped at testing & feedback)
• video on YouTube
• transcript

Announcements

• Music today: Clair de Lune by Claude Debussy, because, for me, it achieves the 4th level of user experience
• Grades have been posted to Sakai (haven’t double-checked the upload yet though)
• Assignment 2: Web Site is due this week
• Assignment 3: User Stories is due next week

Tips from mentors

Some mentors shared some good tips related to project management.

From Jacob Yackenovich, mentor to Team R:

• grant all teammates authority to make decisions on work items
• encourage your teammates to disagree with you/with each other if there isn’t consensus
• you don’t have to decide in a vacuum: you can ask for help
• you might benefit from shared work hours and having an “open zoom” meeting where everyone is working and no one is talking by default
• roll forward: if a decision turns out to be wrong, make forward progress as you change the decision

From Stacey Wright, mentor to Team U:

• project management work is 1/3 of any project, and testing is another 1/3
• (so don’t stress out if PM takes some time—that’s expected)

In The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks said that actual coding time is 1/6th of the total time! The full ratios:

• 1/3rd time for planning
• 1/6th time for coding
• 1/4th time for component tests
• 1/4th time for system tests with all components in hand