What I felt at the end During the presentation the next day, I was utterly exhausted, slightly relieved, and also filled with frustration that I could not act out upon. The people who had done the least work were presenting the product as if they had any right to do so. It wasn't even a good presentation, filled with stuttering, obviously unprepared as to what to say, last minute put together slides with vague outlines. When you asked what the number (<5) stood for, and one of them replied "the number of people", it felt like an insult to the project, a slap in the face. It represented the AGE CATEGORIES, NOT THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE, anyone with any inclination towards the development of this project would know this as it was added 2 weeks prior! Even though I mouthed out the answer, I was too tired to follow up on it. Throughout the entire presentation, I felt like all the hard work that I put in, that my teammates who actually did something put it, were being trampled upon. Maybe because I was so exhausted at the time, but I was honestly on the verge of a break down. I can only hope that our teacher Dr Oon was able to discern out the bullshit. I don't care if you think you "marketed" the product, even though in which universe did we ever market our product, but to claim credit in areas that you did not contribute? I take offense to that. Please know who really did the "UX design", I did not receive any help whatsoever getting user requirements, did not receive any design blueprint or prototype even without code. Yes he might have done some minor fed like changing the font color, or adding a logo or two, but UX? I hope the stealing of credit is not condoned, even in a group assignment. Please please verify with the Github repository for any claim to work anyone of us makes. My thoughts on Agile Agile states that I as an individual has to view my teammates as people who are willing to work towards the betterment of the project. And that in every disagreement we have, we are eventually working to build a better product in our eyes. Early on in the project I was willing to embrace this practice, and I truly tried to follow this manifesto. However, later on in the project no matter how hard I tried, it was just not possible. Yes in a perfect team where everyone is employed, or is passionate about the project he/she is working on, this will hold true. However, in a school based assignment, it is not the case. I am now going to show you why I think so. Towards the deadline of the project, I could feel some people in my team, who very obviously had not contributed much, starting to panic. They often try to show more "enthusiasm", but due to their overdue tasks and procrastination, enthusiasm alone cannot suffice. Work done in an Agile methodology shows, it shows in the sprint board (Trello, note that Trello is not a completely accurate representation of work done as due to the circumstance, in order to preserve the workflow of the team, I decide to let some things slip by), it shows in the Github commits, it shows in the presentation. On the last night of the project, this dam of exasperation finally broke, and it did some damage. Somewhere around 4am on the last night, after one of my teammates wakes up this exchange happens: Under normal circumstances I would view this as a reasonable conflict, however given that the deadline was only 5 hours away, and we still did not have a decent looking product, as you have seen from the previous segments, why would anyone in the right mind be upset about me putting in extra work for the project? Note: I did ask TWICE if had free reign over the styling since I knew nobody was going to be doing anything on the last night. In the back of my mind I knew why he was upset, I just had no confirmation. You see, the person "in-charge" of front end development and UX design had done almost squat the entire project. I gave him leeway up till the eleventh hour to try doing something substantial to no avail. So what happens when I step in? He panics. Note: Throughout my entire foray into our project's front end development, I TOOK OUT NOTHING, knowing that effort went into every line of code, I made sure to include all past designs and additions in my changes. So I only added on, not remove. As you can see in an Agile development environment like this, sometimes the motivation process behind peoples actions are not for the betterment of the project. Requesting "equal footing" when one obviously has not put in any noticeable effort besides talking the entire duration of the project. I do understand that in a team, there has to be an idea guy, BUT in a development team, if I had to pay a DEVELOPER solely to talk and give NON SUBSTANTIATED IDEAS by code due to the very fact that he cannot understand code, I would rather not hire him at all. Would you not agree?
How can I stand by the Agile manifesto when I am presented so blatantly with the "since I did not do anything, you should not do anything either" mentality? After this exchange, I was filled with rage. I am here having worked my butt off for portfolio the past 2 weeks on its FED and UX, not complaining about the lack of work done, having not slept the entire night rushing the final touches, and here comes a guy who, to me, justifies sabotaging our project just because he feels that his credit weightage is threatened?! A person who just woke up from his nap while I have been working since the previous day?? At the end of the day, I just truly want our project to be something we can be proud of, something we can show off to people, since our ux and fed was the most lacking, I just wanted to make it presentable since I had the time. Am I not working towards the betterment of the project? I honestly could care less about the credit given to me, because I knew I had already done enough from my original role as the back end developer. The Agile methodology has served our group well throughout the initial and mid stages, but at the end I come to realize the potential flaw in its manifesto. Thoughts On The Team I would gladly work with Cheng En, Ernest, and Harald again in any project. They have the right enthusiasm, the right work ethic, and the right skills needed to carry out the job. As for the other two: Wei Bing? Replace him with a potato and you wouldn't even notice, 0/10 skills, 0/10 enthusiasm, 0/10 work ethic, as good as a potato. Buddhi? Extend the project by one day (i.e. 12 weeks and 1 day) and you can kick him out of the team, maybe even half a day. Sorry if this feels much like a rant, but I was just so very disappointed with some of my team members towards the end.
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This week I would like to say that I did every single aspect of the front end development. The gathering of user feedback pertaining to style was done by me, implementing those styles were done by me, every animation on the site was done by me, the pop up descriptions on hover was done by me, the seamless navbar to background transition was done by me, the revamp of a square block navbar was done by me. I would like to claim that I solely did the UX design for our website based on user input from my classmates generous enough to give me feedback through out the last rush hour night. I researched and implemented the animations and transitions for all the web pages in a last ditch attempt to give it a more polished feel. I would like to emphasize on "solely", if someone were to say they "helped" me do any of the front end, they are bullshitting. The end result was: Check out a full demo video here: Week 14
This week I was particularly disappointed with my team. On Sunday, I had spent the entirety of my afternoon touching up and styling the the website pages to make it a presentable prototype on Monday for Dr Oon, working from 12pm to 2am in the night, as seen from the previous section, while my teammates were supposed to update and submit the inception deck. I thought that this was the opportunity that our new member Wei Bing could do some work, and that I could rely on my other teammates to finish updating the inception deck while I was touching up the website. Everyone was made aware and agreed to work on the inception deck and submit it before the deadline 2359, however the next day at school, I found out that not only was the inception deck not submitted, not a single person had initiated or even looked at the old inception deck. Their reasons were "doing UX". I was disappointed because I too had UX but I placed the importance of our project ahead during that time as UX submission was still 2 days away. Thus we had a late submission for 10% of the module grade. From that day I found that I could not completely rely on some of my teammates anymore. Week 14, I made finishing adjustments to how the calendar page was going to display information. Due to the closing dateline and urgency to focus on ux, I scrapped the dynamic display containers that I was originally planning to do with ascx user controls, and instead replaced it with the generic table format. Coupled with the rush to finish other assignments, I did not manage to achieve during the weekdays. Over the weekend I had was thinking of ways to make our website more user friendly, taking heed Dr Oon's advice on Thursday who said that our UX was lacking. I had the idea to make a kind of tutorial page where new users can at a glance tell what features out website provide, and what they could do with them, so I created the frontdesk menu. DISCLAIMER
FROM HERE ON OUT, I WILL BE ACTIVELY MAKING AN EFFORT TO MENTION EVERY LITTLE DETAIL OF FRONT END DEVELOPMENT THAT I HAVE DONE. I DO NOT USUALLY DO THIS AND DO NOT USUALLY WORRY ABOUT CREDIT DISTRIBUTION, BUT IN THIS CASE, I FEEL THAT THE WORK DISTRIBUTION REGARDING FRONT END DEVELOPMENT HAS BEEN SO UNEVENLY DISTRIBUTED AMONG PEOPLE WHO I FEEL TO HAVE POOR WORK ETHIC THAT I AM COMPELLED TO DEFEND THE WORK I HAVE CONTRIBUTED. I WILL NOT DISCREDIT ANYONE BUT I WILL BE SURE TO TAKE CREDIT FOR ANY WORK I FIND SUBSTANTIAL. I WILL ALSO PROVIDE BEFORE AND AFTER IMAGES OF WORK I HAVE DONE SINCE IT IS FRONT END DEVELOPMENT RELATED AND CAN BE JUDGED BY THE COVER. I have worked with many teams in my poly journey with lackluster teammates, which usually fail to falter me as I do not mind "carrying" them. In this case, due to certain events that played out towards the end, I have decided to make an exception. The posts after this will be a recollection of my progress made on the project, written after its completion. Week 12 This week was mainly spent getting back into the swing of things. Discussing where we left off and what work had been done. As usual not much work had been done, especially the front end. At this juncture, a 12 week project in my opinion should not be looking like a low fidelity prototype. We should have had some form of design and styling done but it was not. Week 12 flew by fast. Week 13 This week, Herald managed to find some backgrounds which we could use for the website to give it a consistent feel. Over the course of the week, still no front end was being done. Not to mention names, but the people supposedly in charge of front end have practically done a few hours worth of front end work the entire 13 weeks. The changes that they made I could have done in less than 3 hours, most of, if not all of the code is practically copy pasted from w3 schools. I will elaborate more on this down below. Over the weekend, I styled, using heralds provided background, pages to give it a consistent look and feel. I gave each title tag their individual styles with the underlines, I fixed indentation errors that all the pages had which was causing a scroll bar to appear at the bottom even though there was nothing to scroll. I fixed hard coded styling of countless containers to make the responsive to page width. Added the relevant images into the boxes, relevant descriptions and css decorations to those containers. I trimmed redundant copy pasted code that did nothing, and I did that for every single page on the website. Please refer to our Github for more information.
Week 5 On the beginning of week 5 I think I did not do much, was kind of slacking. Due to the way I felt mentioned in my previous post, I had little drive to do any work as my teammates started to gain steam. I basically went to class daily to answer questions pertaining to code and fed. Also to discuss on new ideas like the calendar and schedule page which was recommended by Dr Oon. During hackathon, I worked on the back-end of the calendar display page, thinking of ideas on how to view events and activities related to them. I felt like our team pulled through during the hackathon as we all worked hard and diligently while other teams might have been playing with the switch or doing other work. Our team managed to complete most if not all of the back-end features of the website, with only minor adjustments needed. Front-end made some progress but was apparently not enough as the shabby UI pulled our demonstration of a viable prototype down. Week 6 This week, we each worked on touch ups for our individual tasks, but mainly not much progress was made as a break after hackathon. Conclusion The following few weeks we decided that we would focus on the upcoming common test and after that during the 2 week holiday, we agreed that working on the project was optional. During the holidays however I did try to mess around with some minor styling, trying to find ways to make our product look more presentable. This was just some very basic styling that I had begun doing to make the page look less of just a plain framework. Nothing substantial. At this point in time, I did not want to touch the front end as I was mainly doing the back end work, but I felt like I had to start familiarizing myself with the possibility that the front end team were not up to the tasks presented to them.
Week 3 After the discussions in week 2, in week 3, things moved slowly. It felt like even though we all seemed to be involved and enthusiastic in class, the moment class ended, portfolio 2 was thrown into the background. Throughout the week, during lessons we would be discussing ideas, theory crafting stuff, still no practical work being done. Somewhere along the week during lessons, we created a local project which was hosted onto Github. Now that we had a shared project space going, we could get work done. I started working on the back end of an Activities display page while other did their stuff. By the end of week 3, I had a working activities page which could access a local database, and display data with user filtering capabilities. By this time, I felt like our project was going too slow, and was not standing out enough, at the moment it felt just like a web assignment combined with an fed assignment. With that I had the idea of hosting our website online where it could be an actual product where users could access. During my free time, I started consulting other groups who had started setting up similar web based projects. Namely my classmate Sheline's group who was also working on a web based project, I got pointed in the right direction by her, saying we should try to host our website live through the various free web hosting providers I wanted to start somewhere, give our group something to work with, thus I came up with 2 main things we had to have. First a live database which could be accessible online, and second a live platform which we could collaborate to develop. Through my research, I found certain free sites and tried various methods to host asp.net/webforms. Most of the methods I tried turned out to be too tedious requiring too much hands on file handling, and would not be suitable to work on as a group. By the end of the weekend on week 3, I decided to settle on Microsoft Azure with a free trial. I chose Microsoft Azure because it satisfied both conditions of having a database (sql which all of us were familiar with) and reliable hosting services allowing for collaboration between Microsoft accounts which all of us had (np email). After much frustration and troubleshooting (because of the trend of webpages shifting from webforms to mvc), I was finally able to set up a live platform which I believe our team would be able to work on with little inconvenience and adaptation. I was ready to share this information with our group the following week. Week 4
This week I shared the with my team how we could host our website online, and we made adaptations to follow suit. Not much coding work had been done yet, so the transition was relatively easy. With a live platform now set up, the vision we had of a event planner usable by people became more of a reality and we were noticeably more productive. Together with the live database set up, we were able to plan out the various pages and the data tables we needed, which was handled by Herald and Cheng En. The rest of the week was mainly spent doing debugging and adding small changes. Conclusion Up to this point, my contributions are: set up a Trello board as an online sprint board (converting and organizing user stories to individual tasks), set up the Github to facilitate group collaboration, finished the back-end of the Activities Page, and set up the live server hosting and database. At this point in time, I felt quite satisfied with the progress we had made, but at the same time I also felt like I was the only one initiating any kind of technical work for the project. I understand that the time we have in class should be enough for development, and that I cannot ask my teammates to spend their free time outside of class to contribute towards the project, but free time had to be sacrificed in order to get the project on its feet, and it was my free time that I was using, and some part of me felt like it was unfair. Not much was done in week one except selecting of project themes and assigning of teams so there's nothing much to talk about.
In week 2 I was assigned/selected by the product owner Buddhi who had a pretty decent idea of a website with primary function to facilitate activity sharing for secondary function event planning. I thought it was interesting and also wanted to create a website which would allow me to practice ASP.Net or MVC instead of messing around with some half-baked raspberry pi project. In the storming phase, I realized that Buddhi's vision was a little different from what I had expected. It was heavily inspired by the existing platform Steam, maybe a little too inspired. It made little difference to me what vision he had, either way I was going to get to develop it. My main role was just to ask questions and criticize certain aspects of the product that I did not understand while also giving some suggestions to replace them. Some aspects of the project I felt were too complex and unnecessary, some aspects of Steam were simply not needed and tailored for our project. At times I felt it a little tiring that I had to constantly ask questions, I felt like the vision was not well thought out with little care for how we were going to achieve it. It mostly fluff and dreams with no realistic plan, e.g. "Steam has this, we should have it too." "Steam has that, we should have that." It felt like it was obvious how some things did not make sense, but in the discussions we had no one would bring it up, effectively leading me to bring things up all the time. Asking so many questions riled up some arguments that went mostly with the Product Owner telling me "we have to think like the user, don't think as a programmer". I completely understand the sentiment of thinking what the user wants, but at times I feel like we had to be more realistic. Also while asking so many questions, I felt like I was being questioned on why I was questioning the product, at one point being asked "why did I join the project if I did not believe in it". First of all I am completely for the project idea, I am not against it. Is asking questions a bad thing? I think it is important when planning up a project to be realistic and to ask many questions that might cause problems in the future. Is the planning phase meant to be a all in "I want this feature" discussion without considering the implications of them? I know it is not my place to say and is definitely not the right thing to say, but I constantly feel like some of my teammates do not think (critically). They often talk with emotions about what they want and what they feel is right with little and poorly given justifications. Personally it gets exhausting at times feeling like you have to constantly question the ideas which makes it seem that I am against the project when I am not. This does not only extend to Portfolio, it extends to much of my experience in the Polytechnic. I do love studying in Ngee Ann and learning new stuff but boy is interacting with some people exhausting, another reason why I feel like attendance should be scrapped and study material released in advance. Don't get me started on SOME of the lecturers. I completely respect them and the area of expertise that they have, but sometimes they have such a one dimensional mindset, sometimes I wonder if they even understand the slides that they are reading from. No doubt they are knowledgeable on the subject matter but they don't make good teachers, another reason for no attendance and self study. Getting sidetracked so i'll end this blog entry here. Thanks for reading! |
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February 2019
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