In September I decided to enroll in another round of part-time university study as my schedule seemed to permit, and I placed myself in “Software Design Methodologies” or Coms 309. Pretty swiftly I ended up with a team and a mission: to design a software for tracking weather balloon flights done by Iowa State’s SSCL lab. The team consists of Joe who works at the lab and had the idea, Adam, Bader and myself.

The software needs to take information gathered over APRS (automatic position reporting system) from the high altitude balloon and present it to a flight manager as well as a recovery team who will be chasing it. It needs to handle prediction of where the balloon is likely to go next so that the recovery team doesn’t waste too much gas tracking it, store the data from the entire flight for later review, and a whole slew of other requirements.

The class is centered around model driven development. Being more of a natural at developing software off the cuff it has been a big adjustment for me to slow down and look at the problems involved and define them carefully. The main thing I want to get out of the class is to get a real understanding of how teams work together most effectively, and having a clear model using an SRS, DFD, formal use cases, etc are new to me and obviously very useful information. This will change the way I approach software development projects for clients and probably result in my being able to solicit more interesting jobs.

My former approach was simply to jump directly to use cases and feature lists, make an estimate and present that to the client. This works just fine for smaller projects. When you have a team however, or a client who is more risk averse, you can’t do that without creating potential areas of confusion and insecurity. Modeling ensures that your client has exactly the same understanding of the project that you do. Nothing is worse than wasting developer time.

I’ll post again about the specifics of the project and the end result closer to the end of the semester in December. There are a number of unexpected problems that I have to overcome in terms of management of the project and I will write about them in more detail when the job is done.