CST 300 - Week 2 - More than just a draft

 Part 1: Review and Reflect Learning Strategy

Taking a look first the “Effective Study Skills” document, the top three items I excel in are:

• Gathering Materials Before You Write: I am good at gathering sources before I write a paper which is a habit I’ve learned from other writing classes. It helps create a mental structure even prior to an outline.

• How to use your time: I have a routine in life, and it helps me be effective with my time no matter what I’m doing.

• The value of a schedule: I keep a physical planner / schedule. It’s very helpful to keep track of deadlines.

In terms of where I can improve, or where I’m weakest in, it would be the following:

• Taking Notes: I am not the best note taker. It would be beneficial to try to focus on this more.

• Reading Multiple-Choice Questions: I have been known to make mistakes on quizzes because I am not thoroughly reading each multiple choice answer. Going slower on tests and quizzes is constantly something I’m trying to do better.

• Study Space: My study space is my office, which can make it hard for me to focus on academics.

Part 2: Preview Time Management Skills

Filling out the activity log with my typical schedule was a fun activity. I actually printed the schedule and stuck it to the wall above my desk. Here is my activity log:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LRzLbwechjMjkyoALPBOOQw_lrCqysclU72msEdDMTM/edit?usp=sharing 

Part 3: Project Management Basics

It’s always interesting to learn more about project management as a whole. In software we mostly (depending on the organization) follow Agile principles. This of course comes in many forms be it via Scrum, Kanban, or waterfall – with tons of options on the software side to help give the “rails” to teams. Still learning from a foundational perspective, via these videos was quite interesting.

The first video “Introduction to Project Management” first covers the basics of what a project actually is. It introduces the time, scope, cost constraint which is key. It’s impossible to have all three, and as such based on the goals of the project – we must prioritize which things we care about when we start a project. It also talks about the reasoning for why a project begins. Is it a business need, a legal requirement, a request from customers? There needs to be a strong reason for the project to exist, in order for there to be the internal will to follow it through and spend resources on it. It also talks about the Project Manager, or PM, role and their responsibilities. They shepard a project to delivery and are constantly adjusting based on the time, scope and cost constraints. They are also responsible for negotiating such things with stakeholders and keeping the team aligned with stakeholder feedback and expectations. The video also covers the structure of a project team, and stresses the importance of having coverage for each important role necessary for a project. For example, you couldn’t make a building without a structural engineer. Having the necessary components on the team is key to a project's success.

The second video is about making Work Breakdown Structures, WBS, in order to break down a large project into smaller pieces or deliverables. Oftentimes projects can be huge in scope: “Make an ecommerce site to sell pillows.” Rather than jumping straight in, it’s important to break down this large piece of work, to smaller more manageable pieces. For example we create major deliverables: “Web Design”, “Checkout Flow”, “Project Listing”, “Product Photography”, “Product Copy”. By breaking down a monolithic task into smaller chunks we make things more manageable from a project management perspective. This breakdown also introduces “Work Streams” which gives the benefit of having distinct owners for various pieces and allows us to parallelize work. It also gives very clear accountability. The video also introduces the concept of MECE, Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive which is important for these broken down tasks. Each task should be fully exclusive and independent of one another, and scope should be well defined and unambiguous. This is much easier said than done, but highlights the importance of great Project Managers or the value of Project Management at larger organizations.

The last video is about the ever pervasive Gantt chart which is an essential tool for project management at many organizations worldwide. Essentially the Gantt chart acts as a visual representation of the Work Breakdown Structure for a given project with the added element of timeline. The axis of a Gannt chart are activities and time. It allows us to easily visualize the parallel work streams and work items, while showing the completion time of each item along the x-axis. No matter how large the project, it can act as a birds-eye view of the deliverables and overall project timeline. That said, it’s only as useful as your estimates are accurate :) 

Part 4: Check Out Previous Capstones

As far as previous capstones from Summer 2024 go, there were my picks of the ones that stood out to me:  

1. Drive Diary: I like this a lot as a concept, especially as someone who constantly forgets when I last serviced my car. It’s a very practical product. I also really liked that their registration had email verification as well, a small detail but shows how thorough they were in planning.

2. A Bird’s Song: I am a gamer at heart, so Bird Song sung to me (pun very intended). I really appreciated how ambitious this project was and applaud the team for taking it on. As far as the presentation itself, I also really liked the team’s candor as far as the scope being too big and discussing the things they didn’t complete. When we build projects, or products it’s important to discuss and acknowledge the compromises we sometimes have to make along the way.

3. Town-Hub: From a purely practical perspective I love this project. I always use craigslist and think to myself, “Why is this site so old”. It was nice to see what the team built and how intuitive the UI was for adding products and events. 

Part 5: Summarize Your Week on Your Learning Journal

This was certainly a busy week!

The essay was obviously a big chunk of work that truly required some dedicated time. Jumping from an outline to a true essay is no easy task. I really appreciated the thorough feedback the professor left on my outline, I think it helped to build confidence in what I had and also helped me focus on the areas that needed improvement as I moved to a “draft stage”. It will be very interesting to read my other team member’s essays and leave comments on them. Hopefully they had a good time doing them.

Still despite the draft being a huge focus of the week, there were still some great gems from the rest of the material this week.

I actually really enjoyed learning more about project management as a whole. I think as Software Engineers, we’re typically thrown into whatever methodology or process a given organization uses with very little context. I remember joining a company, and all of a sudden being part of scoping meetings with no idea what the “number” related to scope actually meant. I feel it’s an essential skill for developers to come out of school with a loose understanding of how projects should be managed and tasks should be broken down into smaller pieces.