I made a number of realisations today, let me list them:
- We really needed to sit down as a group and think long and hard about how those dive tables were going to be stored and also how we can access them with a computer.
Why?: Everyone who has looked at those tables has a different picture in their head of how they are being computerised, we don’t seem to have a single solid idea of how this is going to work. For example the table columns that Stacey and Alan used are partially inappropriate for actually accessing the data using a computer. I actually wrote code today that looks up a column, goes down to find a cell with the required data in it and then comes back up again to reference another cell just to get the residual nitrogen. That is very bad design and the time it takes to process is actually noticeable!
- We underestimated the time that the computerisation of the tables would take.
- Complex tasks often require more complex approaches (or simple approaches that use what can be considdeed “complex” implementation from those who are unfamiliar with them).
This is more a failing with me than anything else. Presenting the group with the knowledge on how they can access the dive tables and use that seemed simple to me, evidently this isn’t the case.
The entire team really had to pull together today in order to get this block cleared out, all of the pairs plugging away at tasks and programming to try and move forward. The end result was code that could look up the tables and it managed to perform one of the calculations however doing much more really required a re-design of the table structure and so we could not implement it in the time we had.
I do feel we have better prepared for tomorrow however, we know what we did wrong last time (and I sure wont be turning up late nor looking like I have been run over by a hummer a couple of times). In essence better but could still be improved further. But then that is part of what we do in life, continually try and improve ourselves.
