Standing Meeting 3: Successes and Failures

As always, we begin our standing meeting by reviewing our goals from last week.

• Create a simple log in page for the website. 
• Create a subversion repository for our project.
• Implement tests to simulate Amber's success story.
• Allow Amber to experience success in her user story.
• Develop a mock-up of what we expect the user interface might look like.

This week, we for the first time experienced both success and failure in our goals. We were able to make a website for our users to log in to, but failed to build the framework on the back end to build our project. I think that we are still going through the stages of becoming familiar with Python and Django, which is keeping us from being able to look to the future of our project. As we become more aware of our tools and what we can do with them, we will be able to visualize how our project might form so that we can begin building that road. To make a very poor analogy, we are chefs who are cooking a dish from a foreign country. We have cooking (programming) skills already, but we are most familiar with the foods (programming language, backend infrastructure) of our own country (Java, C). Until we've had the chance to experiment with the foods from the foreign country (Python, Django, Web application programming, unit tests, subversion repositories) we won't know how to craft them into an expert dish.

With that said, we have to accept that some of our goals might be unattainable with our present skills, but they might be more accessible later on. We added to our incomplete goals a few new goals for this week.

• Create a subversion repository for our project.
• Implement tests to simulate Amber's success story.
• Develop a mock-up of what we expect the user interface might look like.
• Implement Wilbur's success story.
• Make a preliminary structure of the models that we plan to use in our project.

What's that you say? What is Wilbur's success story? Well I'm glad you asked.

Wilbur is interested in this new craze going around his neighborhood, he's heard something about being able to turn lights on in his house without actually touching the light switch. His friend, Amber, says that he can sign up for an account with the HAM website and request that a technician visits his house to set up the system. Wilbur isn't sure about having a stranger coming into his house to fiddle with electronics, but he figures it couldn't hurt to sign up for a website. He navigates to the HAM website and creates a new account. He then logs in to the website.

While we currently aren't sure if this would be something that we would allow at our company (maybe users would have to install the system before they can have an account on the website) we hope that it will be good to experiment a little bit with the food and learn something in the process.