Week 4- Gambling our way to prediction

We started off by discussing the readings given last week related to Silver bullet, designing and estimating. The project overview was discussed which gives a blue print of the features to be considered while taking a project forward. These included- Quality, cost, time and scope. We went on observing each of them carefully and found that time taken is directly proportional to the clarity of the goals set and the amount of work delivered after every stage. Setting unrealistic goals decreases the possibility of success and too much firmness on the guidelines can again spoil the soup. On the whole, time to time feedback both by users & developers was important. The chances of success are less if the scope of the project does not address the problem area properly but can become overly complex if it tries to deal with too many problems at a time. Quality & Cost play an important role as well. The project is going to fail if quality is compromised and the company can suffer huge losses if the cost is not been taken care of. After that there was a brief overview of systems and its types.

After that, each one of us briefly discussed the prospective projects we would undertake which presented a lot of innovative ideas. I personally have selected “Systems in Space” in which I would be pursuing intensive study of the systems that are used in space crafts and satellites. I selected this topic as it was my childhood dream to work at NASA and when I got this opportunity to get a free hand at selecting a topic, I preferred to choose this one.

The Buxton’s avalanche case was given as homework in which a person called Saul gets stuck in the avalanche and his wife and friend try to free him from that.

Now here is the Gambling fun part- Planning Poker, this was the very first time I had seen his unique planning and estimation technique which was not boring as the conventional pen paper method. We were a group of 5 people and one by one everyone acted as the client and read out the question for which rest of us made an estimate by selecting a relevant card. The situation was to teach school children how to make and operate robotic models. First there was some concern about which measuring unit to consider while predicting. Whether the time, effort, cost but we decided that we’ll not disclose our units and if there is a huge gap, we’ll go ahead to reveal. We started off with different units but then realised and ended upon the “effort” (easy or tough). On the whole, we agreed upon more or less the similar values and discussed all of them after every question, whether they were same or not. In all, a good technique, which I am looking forward to taking back to India and using in the real time professional world.