Cazinge Final Reflection

Individual Assessment and Reflection

Each person on the team will complete an assessment and reflection individually. If you are comfortable with making this assessment publicly available, you may write it up as a wiki page or as a Word document uploaded to your group deliveables page. If you prefer to communicate your assessment privately, then email this to both Drs. Dahlquist and Dionisio.

Statement of Work

• Describe exactly what you did on the project.
  • I was responsible for the Journal Club report and the majority of the getGeneInformation part of the project, which was the function that the page used to retrieve data from the various databases. In addition, I provided assistance to the majority of the of the other groups as somewhat of a lead-developer on the project.

• Provide references or links to artifacts of your work:
  • (Content referenced from John Lopez's individual reflection)
  • The Week 11 presentation.
  • The getGeneInformation() Code
  • The group paper.
  • The group presentation
  • README

Assessment of Project

• Give an objective assessment of the success of your project workflow and teamwork.
  • I believe that our project was ultimately successful, given the amount of web development experience that the majority of the team necessarily had prior to the project. As discussed, I completed on the brunt of the workload required for the geneInformationFunction, but there was always some work that I could delegate to John; for example, he was responsible for the majority of the XML parsing present in the function, and ultimately learned about how our functions worked through doing so. All in all I think our team preformed well with Corinne keeping us on task and Dina doing the Biological work.
• What worked and what didn't work?
  • In terms of what worked, I think that my taking a leading role in the project played a large role of our success within the constrained time period. Similarly, maintaining a hands-off relationship with John and allowing him to proceed at his own pace was more than beneficial to the end result of the project.
  • In terms of what didn't work, I believe that we could have communicated more effectively than we did. By keeping ourselves up to date with not only the project's changing requirements, but also each other's progress, we may have been able to produce more cohesive and complete work within the given timeframe.
• What would you do differently if you could do it all over again?
  • If I could start over, I'd establish stringent criteria in order to force the team to communicate with one another on a more rapid cycle.
• Evaluate your team’s portion of the GRNsight Gene Page Project and Group Report in the following areas:
  1. Content: What is the quality of the work?
  • The quality of the work is up to the par set by the projects deliverable expected from our team, as well as the milestones set out by the Coder's Wiki Page.
  1. Organization: Comment on the organization of the project and of your group's wiki pages.
  • Our organization, while not entirely perfect, was good enough in order to keep our group in sync and up to date at regular intervals.
  1. Completeness: Did your team achieve all of the project objectives? Why or why not?
  • Our group finished the assignment as completely as the scope of the project allowed. There was some data that the Project Managers would have liked to see from us, but as this data was not fed from the original data sources as mentioned from Week 9's homework assignment, it was not within the scope of this assignment to ensure the accessibility of that data.

Reflection on the Process

• What did you learn?
  • With your head (biological or computer science principles)
    • The most important thing that I learned from this might just be how working with a group of people with differing skill sets operates on a conceptual level. It definitely wasn't easy staying in sync with the entire class, but we were successfully able to bridge the Bio/CompSci gap whenever necessary.
  • With your heart (personal qualities and teamwork qualities that make things work or not work)?
    • I learned that it is important not only to be able to handle large quantities of work, but also be able to help other people while proceeding at their own pace. If I wasn't able to help the other groups with a calm and consistent demeanor, the entirety of our project might have ended up in a much worse place than it did.
  • With your hands (technical skills)?
    • The sed command is now integral to my Bash developer tool kit, and I explicitly have this class to thank for that.
• What lesson will you take away from this project that you will still use a year from now?
  • • Honestly I love the sed command, it's extremely liberating, and I can see myself using it even 5 years into the future.