Week 2- From building a robot to building a team

The class started with the follow up discussion on the NATO software conference a part of which was read last week.

Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is the backbone of every software whether big or small developed in any organization of any scale and it essentially helps in carrying out the processes in a much more organized pattern. On the whole, the essence of every SDLC remains the same in terms of its structure and what it tries to attain, few differences matter depending on software to software and organization to organization. Some common stages involved in every software cycle includes- Feasibility, Requirement analysis, Design, Coding, Implementation and finally Testing and Maintenance. One or more stages may be combined depending on the use. For example, some of the SDLC’s which I studied during my undergraduate degree had Testing & Maintenance or Coding & Implementation as a single stage.

And then the “Playing” part began. We were given an apparatus which looked like a robotic set. It included the main controller, sensors and connecting wires. We tried out the working of the model with different sensors, different programs to make it run in different direction & ways. Then we sketched out our own robot model on a paper representing the same apparatus. After that, we were given an instruction manual to make a given model of an operational robot. It was a group activity and I was involved with four more people- Agrima, Abeer, Sarthak and Gagan. Unfortunately we were not able to replicate the exact structure on time but we were happy for working in good coordination and getting the insights of team work & management. Here are the refection points:

Pros:

We started off well, in a very organized manner
We distributed the tasks equally between pairs of two and three which was a good decision as we were able to do it well
Perfect coordination & mutual understanding between the team

Cons:

Took a lot of time to start, figuring out the instruction manual
Got confused in between, used the wrong tools to connect and then correcting them was too late to do

The homework for today includes an experiment with an activity based research methodology given to or selected by us. My partner is Agrima Raina and we have been given the topic- “Word concept association”