There’s a Story Somewhere
I promised everyone that the documentation would be comprised of an extensive, thorough, and lengthy document. I also claimed that we would embarrass other groups with our voluminous publication. At 32 pages versus the next highest of nearly 5, I think we succeeded.
(The documentation is available under the appendix if you’re interested in downloading it.)
The only unfortunate aspect of generating lengthy documentation was something I had neglected to consider. Our instructor had mentioned that she was going to print out relevant portions of our documentation for other groups to “test.” I think some of our peer reviews suffered because the length of our documentation prohibited Dr. Kreie from printing out applicable sections. It would effectively be like printing out a couple of pages from a 500 page novel and expecting someone to provide a favorable review of the plot. Evidently, the few unfavorable reviews didn’t hurt our project’s utility much; as many of the students in our class were highly impressed with it. Those who weren’t may have had their own ideals of what the application should have done; but I suspect they may have considered the peer review process as a means of punishing us for our quality. Alas, I tend toward cynicism sometimes!
The Final Chapter
The project was considered completely finished by April and the remainder of our class was focused on a few other things ranging from Oracle Designer (ugh!) to other aspects of systems analysis. With the project over, we were finally able to relax. There were times when we wondered out loud about whose project was ultimately going to be selected. I don’t believe any of us even considered for a moment that our project was to be it! Not that it would have mattered anyway, because our “client” wasn’t able to get back in touch with Dr. Kreie until the summer.
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