Seminar 8 Review

Extremely sorry for the long break, i will try to stay up to date now and catch up the old ones as i can. So here goes...

This seminar was the submission deadline of the project's proof-of-concept, so the seminar started off with each group presenting their proof of concepts. Should anyone be interested to know, Wikipedia defines proof oc concelp as follows:

Proof of concept is a short and/or incomplete realization (or synopsis) of a certain method or idea(s) to demonstrate its feasibility, or a demonstration in principle, whose purpose is to verify that some concept or theory is probably capable of exploitation in a useful manner.

The proof of concept is usually considered a milestone on the way of a fully functioning prototype.

For us it can be just restricted to a demonstration of a partly working model of the user interface of our projects. As with the previous submissions and classworks, even here there were vast differences in the methods used to achieve the end result. Some, including my own group used good ole' power point, nice and simple. In the other end of the spectrum, we had a group with a super hifi flash presesntation, with a real fancy interface, though it too had a few quirks. Somewhere in the middle (sort of) was a group which used a motorola emulator to simulate exactly how their project would function on a phone.

After all the groups were done we began the seminar which was about almost the same topic, design. The professor started out by giving us a seemingly complicated game, where of 2 people each picks a number between 1 to 9 and the first to have 3 numbers adding to 15 wins. we tried this for a while after which Prof Lee Gilbert shows us a magic square with the same numbers in and thats when i realised that what we have been breaking our heads to figure out is nothing but the immortal game of tic-tac-toe. With this innovative start, Prof Lee Gilbert began the seminar of the day on the importance of design in the making of the product. He started off by talking about iterative development, In which he talked about a new concept/tool to me, called use case. From what i understood. It was a method by which u choose a scenario and then devlop the product to be able to handle that scenario and be able to help the user reach his goal. Wikipedia had this to say..

According to Bittner and Spence, "Use cases, stated simply, allow description of sequences of events that, taken together, lead to a system doing something useful" . Each use case provides one or more scenarios that convey how the system should interact with the users called actors to achieve a specific business goal or function.

He called a student, who had a presentation about this topic, up front and he tried to explain to us what was the use case method, but i didnt really get what the big deal was. Then the professor gave use a few examples and then it started to make a bit more sense... After this he talked about some thing called UML(unified modelling language) which was i guess used in design, for use cases, etc. Again i drew a blank so back to Wikipedia ....

In the field of software engineering, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a standardized specification language for object modeling.

Another site of the Kennesaw State University gave a bit more consise explanation so i desided to add that also here..

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a standard language for specifying, visualizing, constructing, and documenting the artifacts of software systems, as well as for business modeling and other non-software systems. The UML represents a collection of best engineering practices that have proven successful in the modeling of large and complex systems.

The seminar ended on this note with the professor reminding all of us that the technology plan, the next assignment of the project was due next week and that it just need to be submitted in the digital dropbox.