Assignment 13: Working technical system with documentation (one swap completed)

Goal

The goal of this assignment is to move your team towards a fully-functioning prototype technology that you can hand-off to another team by the end of the semester.

Team assignment

Your goal by the end of the semester is to hand in a fully functioning prototype of a personal health interface system using an advanced interface technology. The prototype must be sufficiently robust for deployment in a small pilot study to commence the following semester. Teams must hand in not only the functional software/system, but also detailed documentation that would allow non-technical health students to use the technology without assistance from the development team. Achieving the required robustness and simplicity to do this (while still demonstrating innovation) is a challenge.

By the assignment due date, you should have a sophisticated version of your technology functioning. There may still be some rough edges, but for the most part the core functionality you need should be working by this time.

For this assignment, you must demonstrate that not only does your technology work, but that you have created and organized all the documentation/instructions/tools so that another team could potentially use it.

First, make sure everyone on your team can go to the wiki, and get the technology functioning as it would need to be functioning for your proof of concept testing.

Then, imagine a team next semester goes to your wiki. Will that team be able to get your prototype functioning?

To find out, find a student who is not a programmer who is not in the class who has little knowledge of what you are doing. Point that person to the website and have him or her install and run the technology. Do not set everything up in advance. Instead, assume exactly the situation that someone who wants to work on your project but who is brand new to it might encounter when you are not around to help.

After the test, make a plan for what needs to be imporved to streamline this process. Add this information to the wiki as a bullet list of things you learned during the test, clustered into (1) things that worked well, and (2) things that need improvement. Start implementing the things that need improvement.

Hand in:

Hand in the link to the team's Bitbucket wiki, which should include step-by-step instructions for someone to get the prototype technology functional, in instructions on what to do with it to get the gist of how it works and what it does. Your materials should show evidence that you have iterated on this process a few times.

In class, someone not on your team may go through this process as well, using your revised mateirals. Please bring any hardware required for someone to do that to class.

The team will be evaluated, in part, based on whether it is possible for a naive person to not only understand what the technology does, but also to get the prototype running solely from the materials linked from Bitbucket.