Ike’s Status Update 02/29/2020

This week, I worked to condense and underscore the extent of our design work to date, and delivered the Design Proposal presentation to our fellow peers, guiding TA, and experienced professor. Primary objectives for this presentation include: 1) communicating the depth of detailed design work completed, 2) posing a medium for and retrieving peer feedback on feasibility/testing for the design, and 3) confirming optimal action-items moving forward with the professor, enabling the entire team to engender confidence moving forward into the build phase. By refocusing the design process into a significantly more pragmatic sequential flow from Use Cases > Goals > Requirements > Solutions, the full range of the design proposal was translated into a medium more easily interpretable by the peer viewers with facility for evaluation on behalf of the professor and PoC TA. With each design facet itemized into such a chain, this presentation can be used as the core outline for the generation of our Design Review document.

Most importantly, student feedback from the presentation will guide augmentations to our design, build, and success verification plans. The most important such changes will cover:

1. A redefinition of our diving test plan from the 10m board to the 3m board: This delta is due to student feedback regarding CMU facilities lacking the standard olympic 10m board, with all 10m dives (including practice) occurring at University of Pittsburgh facilities. Obtaining testing permissions from this outside institution would be an unnecessary additional time burden that would detract from the development of the remainder of the core project, reducing our ability to meet MVP scope.
2. A heavy consideration to move remote system control from an iOS to an Android framework: As the professor brought up, iOS development comes at a cost factor of $99 for each year of development. If finances become a limitation for our project, reallocating these funds towards broken replacements, part changes due to updates to design, and additional prototypes would be more beneficial for reaching MVP status within the roughly 2-3 month allotted time period.