“You Guys Need to Write More Blog Posts”
And We’re Back!
After soaking up some sun and inspiration at SXSW in Austin, we returned to Pittsburgh, snow, and our NASA project.
The week before spring break was cut short by the beginning of SXSW but was still very productive. We were able to conduct a phone interview with a NASA technician with over 25 years of experience in his position. The interview was very welcome because we did not get the opportunity to talk to a technician during our visit to Kennedy Space Center. Additionally, talking to a technician after analyzing our interviews at Kennedy Space Center allowed us to have more understanding during the interview, ask deeper questions, and not drown in NASA acronym soup.
During the week before spring break, the Capstone course was encouraging the cohort to begin to narrow their research/design efforts and consider 3–5 areas of exploration. From the beginning of the project, our research phase was forecasted to be longer than other groups’, but we still took this opportunity to ask each member what three “areas of interest” should inform the next sprint (after Spring Break).
Sprinting After Spring Break
We started a new sprint schedule right after Spring Break. We decided to have a two-week long sprint and break into two smaller teams: one would finish primary research and the other team would begin researching an analogous domain. This change would allow us to cover more ground and feel less rushed when producing high quality, collaborative deliverables to show the client.
The primary research team worked on a detailed sequence flow diagram that outlined the life and death of a Work Authorization Document for each organization within NASA (that we spoke to). They also made a detailed outline of the research report presentation which was due for the Capstone Course.
The analogous domain team selected an area of interest from the list made by the team before Spring Break. They focused on examining how professionals in other domains surface past information, a key step in the WAD authoring process. They started interviewing a paralegal, a software developer, an academic researcher and researching the tools mentioned. This information was used to create a competitive feature matrix and summaries of the tools.
Not Research or Design, but Important
Fridays are the one day of the week where the whole team can meet for long stretches of time. This Friday, we held our first “retrospective” to address what has gone well and what could use improvement in our group. We hope to schedule these more regularly to optimize our teamwork.
Next week is the last week of our sprint and when all of our deliverables will be ready to show and get detailed feedback from the client. We also plan on having our first Design Day where we will begin visioning. We are super excited!
