Date: 22.08.2019 – 29.08.2019
Group structure:
– Sirajuddin Asjad (project leader) – Software engineering
– Håkon Jordet – Software engineering
– Kristian Klev – Mechanical engineering
– Andreas Bondal Sørensen – Mechanical engineering
This week was our very first session as a group and we went through a few steps in order to plan the group structure and the fundamentals of our project. We started with a brainstorming session already from the very first day, and we agreed upon a couple of potential ideas that we found interesting. We had to make sure to involve some sort of autonomy in our project ideas, since this was one of the requirements from our supervisor.
We spent the entire day on brainstorming different ideas for the project and we came up with some great ideas as well, such as:
1) Remote-controlled chess board
2) Autonomous gokart
3) Smart home system
4) Autonomous person-tracker
5) Autonomous surveillance drone
6) Softgun-robot
The first sprint session was mostly planning and basic understanding of the requirements given by our supervisor. We spent a couple of days looking through old bachelor projects at USN in search for some inspiration. After discussing back and forth for a while and after comparing the different ideas, we decided to make an autonomous drone used for surveillance. We picked this idea because then we can involve group members from all disciplines, since we have three software engineers and two mechanical engineers. Making a fully-functional drone can be very complicated and therefore we can benefit from the fact that we are different people with different engineering backgrounds and experience. After we decided which project we would work on, we had to pick a project name as well, so we landed on “Autonomous Surveillance Drone” – shortened to ASD.
We also did some pre-project planning during the first week, where we planned the development phases ahead, along with different development methods as well. We figured that it is crucial to have a proper and reliable system development life cycle model throughout the entire project in order to have good workflow within the team. This is why we implemented Scrum as our project management tool, which is an agile management framework that is often used in large groups when working together as a team.
Scrum is a brilliant management tool, where we have all of our group tasks in a product backlog and before starting a new sprint, we move some relevant tasks from this product backlog to the sprint backlog in order to inform the team which tasks we will be focusing on. A sprint is a full week, which means that we start a new sprint after documenting the previous one. By using scrum we have been able to keep all group members up-to-date with the project development, and it is great for tracking group participation as well.
We have been using a web application called Trello to manage our scrum boards and this is something we use almost daily in order to keep the workflow going throughout the entire week. So far it has been really great!
The last thing that we managed to do this week was to acknowledge the skillsets of each group member, in order to categorize each individual based on field of interest and competence. We quickly found out what each group member likes to do and what each group member is good at, so we can easily divide and assign tasks within the group. We recognized that some of our software engineers are very good at low-level programming, some prefer frontend development and some prefer to work with data control and management. The same principle goes for our mechanical engineers as well, where some prefer to work with 3D modeling and animations, and some prefer to work with mathematical calculations and statistics.
This combination of interest is very positive for the group in order to achieve great results, where we combine different skills to reach a higher level of completeness and of course a great end-result as well.