Things have been a bit messy for me lately. My team got kicked out of Microsoft’s Imagine Cup competition, and all of the sudden, we have lots of stuff due for submission.
I probably should explain a little: my team is doing a project for submission into the Imagine Cup competition, and are using it as our school’s final year project while we are about it. However, since the competition deadline was tight, the school allowed us to skip all the architecture design parts of the project, and go straight into the coding a workable application. (Although we have to come back eventually and fill out the missing pieces at a later time.)
And all that documentation suddenly became due when we bombed out of the competition. Barely two weeks to write out use case specifications and all the other system design diagrams for a medium sized Information Technology management system. It’s enough to make me dizzy, especially when the last time I took the actual module 2 semesters back, we took nearly 2 months to complete the development designs for a much smaller system! We’ll try to manage the best we can, but it comes to a point where we cannot target everything at once, so I’m adopting a prioritisation strategy. We’re doing the specifications for the main application; the rest of the information management system would have to wait a teeny bit.
With that, I must say that I’m disheartened that Microsoft does not see the value in our product, but I have total faith in the project’s viability. I hope we can secure the school’s support to push our project into a real product, since it would ease the transition for us a lot with the advice of the polytechnic’s Industry Services.
Already, I’m dreaming of the day I would invite Microsoft to our product launch keynote. =) I would love to prove them wrong about their initial judgement.