This week, our team did our first official presentation for our Raytheon liaisons and company members. After applying the feedback we got from our peers and practicing throughout the week, we presented our PDR on Thursday over zoom. The team received good feedback at the end and there were no questions asked. Our next step in the PDR verification process is sending our final PDR to our liaisons and getting their signatures.

The plan for next week is to continue working on our front-end design and, wireframes that will be used as the prototype at the end of the semester. We have started a Figma board where have been organizing all of the aspects of the UI, like the color and font, and where the actual wireframing will take place. Our liaisons have sent us some use cases that we will base the wireframes around.

This week, team Securix presented our PDR presentation to our peers and coach during class. We got some valuable feedback that we have been working to apply before our official presentation with our liaisons. We will be presenting to our liaisons on Thursday next week and, getting their signatures on our PDR document so that we know they approve of our design plan. This week, we also visited the Hatchery together as a team and was able to log on to the computers and explore the already set up infrastructure.

Within the next week, we will continue practicing our PDR presentation up until we actually present. We will also continue developing our wireframes in Figma, as well as work on our concept generations for the UI and portal layouts. For our prototype, our goal is to build an interactive UI and have future users of the portal test it for its usability. The wireframes we are developing will be the first step in the prototyping process.

This week, our team has been preparing to do our first official presentation for the Raytheon liaisons. Team Securix has been working on our Product Design Report (PDR) presentation that features all of the design decisions we have so far and, that we will implement into our project. During class next week, we will present to our peers and get feedback before our official presentation for our liaisons. In addition to this, we have completed our backend trade study and selected Spring Boot to use as our backend technology. Our choice of backend technology has been approved by the liaisons but, we will send them the trade study within the next week. We have also continued working on our wireframes using Figma.

Next week, we will work on polishing and finalizing our PDR presentation by implementing the feedback that we receive from our peers. We will also continue to work on the wireframes and polish them so that the liaisons can see the ideas we have for the user interface. Lastly, we hope to gain access to the Innovation Hatchery so that we can check out the Active Directory and software set up by Raytheon.

This week, the first thing on team Securix’s agenda was to turn in the First Month Report. This report is a collection of all of the things that we have completed in the class and, will help us get feedback before we write and submit our Product Design Specification document. We were also, finally able to turn in our frontend trade study to our liaisons so they could see the frontend language we chose and our reasoning behind the language. Also on the frontend, we defined the heuristic that we will use to test the front end and its usability.

Next week, we have plans to work on our wireframes using Figma and to complete the system architecture model for our project. We will also tour the Innovation Hatchery because we all finally got approved. It is difficult for our team to find a time to all meet so, we will tour individually or in small groups. Lastly, we must confirm the time and location of our Product Design Specification report with our liaisons. We would like the opportunity to go to the Raytheon building; however, it may be difficult in the current pandemic.

It was picture day this week during class and each team member got a professional headshot taken! The team’s headshots will be uploaded to the “Meet the Team” page of the blog when available. Check out the page to see the team’s headshots and learn more about each team member. During the week, the team created a Gantt chart to keep up with deadlines and track our progress. In addition to the Gantt chart, we continued to work on our backend trade study and completed the concept screening matrix for the frontend. Both of these activities are used by the team to analyze the best technologies to use for the project. Last but not least, we began to draw up some wireframes to visualize the UI for the project.

Our main goal for next week is to complete the first month report. This will be a comprehensive report detailing the work we have completed so far and information about the project. We will also begin looking at security tools that can be used to ensure the web portal is as secure as can be, as this is a very important aspect of the project, and begin putting together a list of possible open-source softwares that we can use to help us with some aspects of the frontend development.

During class this week, team Securix presented our logo to our peers and received some helpful feedback. Above is our new and improved logo with a minor change made to the style of the lock. During class we also began working on a concept generation document that helped us brainstorm new ideas for our project and, will help us narrow down our project’s design features in the future. We also began our trade study for the backend technologies and finished the trade study for the frontend technologies. We decided as a team to use React JS, Redux, and Typescript for the frontend development. All of the members on our team are most comfortable with these technologies and they best fit the needs of the project.

We were able to get the frontend technologies approved during our weekly meeting with our liaisons. We also presented our Product Design Specification (PDS) document during the meeting and got some insightful feedback on behalf of the customer. Discussing the PDS also made certain that our interpretation of the project’s requirements were correct. In last week’s blog post we mentioned our plans to visit the Innovation Hatchery this week; however, we ended up running into some roadblocks. Thankfully, we were able to clear up these roadblocks with the help of our liaisons and currently have plans to tour the Hatchery in the upcoming week.

Also in our plans for next week, is creating some preliminary wireframe designs for the web portal. We will also continue working on the backend trade study so that we can send the full trade study document to the liaisons. Visiting the Hatchery should help a great deal with the completion of the backend trade study.

This week, our team started working on our trade study to determine the best frontend technology to use for our project. To complete the trade study we are conducting research to figure out which technology would best suit our needs, and also taking into account the skill levels of each member on the team. We also completed our draft of the Product Design Specification. This document ensures that the team knows all of the requirements surrounding the project so, there is no confusion between our team and the customer when we actually start designing and building the web portal. We were unable to meet with our liaisons this week but, in our next meeting we will discuss the PDS draft and get feedback. We have finalized a time each week to meet with our liaisons, our coach, and separately as a group. Lastly, we implemented a Work Progress Tracker within Microsoft Teams to assign and keep track of due dates within our group.

In the next week our plan is to finish the frontend trade study and begin the backend trade study. The backend trade study will require us to have knowledge of some of the technologies that Raytheon already has in place. To help with this we are going to research these technologies, as well as visit the Gator Hatchery where Raytheon has some existing hardware setup already. This week we will also start planning a project roadmap so that we can stay on track and work efficiently.

Hello and welcome to the blog page for team Securix! Throughout our time in IPPD, the blog page will be used to give weekly updates about the status of the project and list our agenda for the next week. Team Securix consists of four computer science students, led by our coach Ann Ramirez and liaisons Byron George and Mark Sanders. Our team is sponsored by Raytheon and our project is to build a modern and updated, secure web portal.

During the past two weeks we met with each other as a team for the first time, figured out the scope of work for our project and developed questions for our liaison meeting, chose a team name, created our logo, and had a Zoom meeting with our liaisons to introduce ourselves and ask questions about the project. In the next week, we will find a time to schedule weekly meetings with our liaisons and begin a trade study to decide what frontend and backend technologies are best to use for our project.

We are all very excited to be working on this project and with Raytheon, and will update you throughout our journey!