Line 15: Release early and often

Last time I spoke about the large work session that we held last Friday, So I guess I will give an update on that.

We gathered at 3pm that afternoon in the conference room, and we worked there for about 6 or 7 hours. We made decent progress on many aspects of the project, and the fact that we were surrounded by our group members was actually very good for productivity. We were able to ask questions of the group and get immediate responses, which was a tremendous time saver.

We got the wiki into good condition, and then were able to have a mini meeting about what changes needed to be incorporated on each page of it. With the feedback, we each had something to concentrate on for the next week.

We also planned out our trip to POSSCON more, and came up with a good layout for the poster. It features an easy to understand graph that shows what each case Obsidian recognizes to generate test implementations for. We will be focused on having that finished in the coming days.

When we met on Monday night, we basically hammered out a bit of the poster, rearranged some wiki pages, and added a Contact page so that we could just link to it, rather than repeating contact information across multiple pages. We also scheduled out our next week, and decided on meeting times and goals for the project. We have our work cut out for us in the next week, but I still feel like we are in a good position to finish all of this.

We all worked on modifying the wiki pages that we had received critique of on Friday, and they are coming along nicely. The wiki is complete currently, but the information still needs tweaking here and there.

I think that a good test of it would be to give Obsidian to a group or classmate currently in 462, and leave them to try to figure out how to use Obsidian on their own projects without any input from the group. If they can do it easily, that will indicate to me that the wiki provides a good base foundation for new users, and will really put me at ease about its functionality. However, if they are unable to do it, it will highlight areas that need work so that we can increase the usefulness of it before POSSCON. I had this idea while modifying my pages after the meeting, so I am going to talk to Hunter about it tonight, and the group about it either before or after class tomorrow.

The good thing is that the team seems very motivated, and is tackling problems and quickly coming up with solutions to them. POSSCON will be one week away on Wednesday, so we are very obviously in crunch time. The source code and .jar files will go up on the Google Code page next Tuesday, so we only have a little bit of time to finish tweaking before our version 1.0 release. We have the pieces in place to succeed, all that is left is to actually do it.