Enginering Process planning | General | Forum

Post edited 7:48 am – February 28, 2010 by Luke Maurits

As proposed in this earlier thread, where the idea met with positive opinions, I think that now that preparation for SpaceUp is over, we should in the near future begin work on planning a CSTART Project Lifecycle to give us more overall organisation and structure.  There is a Wiki page for this, and it features a little Notice Box saying that it is something we are currently working on and links to this thread.  I thought this would be a good way to (i) make it clear to new comers that they can expect to see rapid development in this area, and (ii) encourage them to help out with the planning.

Looking forward to seeing us get some good work done on this!

EDIT: This might be a good thing to organize another IRC meeting around.

A few thoughts:

1. Will we want some sort of a system for revising decisions once they have been made?  Perhaps a re-vote can be forced if later down the track a large enough number of people feel like things have changed sufficiently to warrant reconsidering the situation?
2. Do we want a system for making temporary, provisional choices?  This might seem unwise, but I worry that the project as a whole will look stagnant and uninspiring if absolutely everything is up in the air for a very long time while we figure out requirements and gather data, etc.

DenisG said:

Anyways, is there any chance in the very near future that this administrative stuff (installation of a project management and requirements management system, creation of such little web apps, etc. etc.) will happen? What are the next steps to be taken to get those things done?

I hope so.  I feel like this is an important thing to get done fairly soon so that we can focus on doing the "real work".  I think a deciding factor in what we can do here is what restrictions our current hosting plan places on us, and Rizwan knows the most about that.  I should suspect that anything which uses PHP and MySQL/PostgreSQL should be absolutely no problem.  Other things I couldn't be so sure about.

How many people here have experience with PHP?  I have some (but mostly using the Symfony framework for largeish apps), but it is not exactly my area of expertese.  Nevertheless, I'm happy to help on this.

Another line of thought on the engineering process.  So far all of our discussion has been centred around design tasks which ultimately come down to choosing one item from a list of alternatives, like choosing a fuel or an oxidiser, or choosing between battery, fuel cell and solar power options, etc.  But some design tasks are not like this.  For instance, coming up with a set of commands for the telecommand system doesn't really fit this mold.  There are infinitely many different "correct" solutions, it is hard to break the task down into subtasks, and there is a certain degree of subjectivity in deciding what is best.  What approach are we going to take for tasks of this form?

I have expanded the material in the Engineering Process Wiki page to give a clearer idea of how the Design Task Trees may end up operating.  I would very much like feedback on this matter.  If people like the direction this is headed I can make templates for the various different kinds of tree nodes to ensure that the Engineering Process is adhered to, and start deploying them throughout the OHKLA and CLLARE trees.

DenisG said:

I meant for that to be the vote mechanism. When one feels the decision matrix is completed, and one feels that one has made his final votes in the matrix, one checks the box. When everyone has checked the box, the decision can be thought of as made, and the results can be moved to the RMS and the design/decision can be implemented.

[Edit]

There's no reason to wait for all informaton to be gathered before starting to fill the matrix.

Aah, I think I see.  So people can cast a vote at any time, but it remains a sort of "temporary vote" until such time as they click the "this vote is final button"?  If so, I think I really like this.

Okay, I am happy to support that idea too, for now.  I would like to know what the other core people thing, though.

Denis, have you had time to read the new stuff on the Engineering Process Wiki page, regarding the Design Task Trees?  If so, do you think that this is a good idea/system?  Will it integrate well enough with things like the RMS?  Or do you think we should handle this another way?  I am very keen to start fleshing out the CLLARE Task Tree a lot, but I don't want to do too much work on it if we are just going to decide to abandon the Wiki Trees system anyway.