This week we presented our PDR to Raytheon at their site in Largo, FL. Our presentation went really well and our liaisons answered all the questions we had. They even gave us a tour of their factory and production facilities their and it was really interesting to see all the work that goes into making the products and tech that Raytheon sells to their customers. We were all shocked to see the scale of their production facility and the different types of technology that goes into the work that they do. They also gave us an explanation of the software that they use to run their factory and it was really cool to hear about the hard work the software engineers do at Raytheon to ensure that all their systems run smoothly.

Going forward, we will work to start contacting each ECM company to get product quotes and more information. Our liaison, Cari said that she will help us with contacting the companies and getting quotes. Since we will be working on the project for the rest of the current semester, and the next, we need to ensure that whatever ECM product we choose has a trial license that will enable us to use it for that time. Many ECM products offer these licenses, so we just have to choose one that will work the best for us in the future.

Coming up, we also have some of our liaisons coming to Gainesville to give us a tour of our lab space in the UF Innovate Hub. They will give us information on how to use the hardware and configure the ECM to work in an environment that accurately replicates the real environment that the Raytheon will deploy our project in. We’re really looking forward to start working on implementing our project now that our research is completed, and we’re excited to start developing features for it.

This week we finalized our PDR presentation. On Thursday the 27th we will drive down to Largo, FL to present it to Raytheon. We’ve been working with the feedback we received from our classmates and coach and incorporated it into our presentation. We’ve also been working on securing our transportation to our liaison site so that the trip is as smooth as possible.

This week one of our liaisons, Mark Sanders, came to visit the class and gave a really insightful presentation about his career. We all really enjoyed hearing and learning about his time at Raytheon and about his many different experiences and positions that he has held.

This week we also attended a lecture about scrum practices and principles. After attending, we decided to adopt scrum as the main strategy for our development. This semester, we have so far not worked much on the development of our application, so the strategies we create now will affect our development experience next semester and for the rest of the project.

Lastly, this week we visited the lab that Raytheon has set up for us at the UF Innovation Hub. We plan on using this space in the future to work on the project and as a collaboration space. We had some issues gaining access to the lab at the beginning of the semester, so it was really nice to visit it for the first time.

This week we finished the initial draft of our PDR presentation that we are going to present to Raytheon. We presented the draft to our class and coach received some really nice feedback and we are working to incorporate these changes into the final document. We plan on presenting the final PDR presentation to Raytheon on the 27th at their office in Largo, FL. We’re all really excited for the road trip and visit and can’t wait to present.

As for the trade study, we finalized the decision matrix that we will use to evaluate the potential replacement ECM solutions for our sponsor. We took each of the criteria requirements for the solution and weighted them. When we are researching a replacement, all we have to do is give it a score for each requirement and the spreadsheet will automatically calculate its percent score. This enables us to really easily compare different solutions with each other because it gives us a numerical value for each. We also finalized the architecture diagrams of the system, which will give us a really good visual representation of the finished version of our project.

Due to hurricane Ian, our team wasn’t able to work last week, hence no update last week. We have resumed work on the project and hope to quickly get back up to speed with everything we had to do.

This week, our team continued met with our liaisons to discuss our rankings of our trade study requirements for our ECM. After reviewing our current weight distributions, we obtained valuable feedback from the company on what their opinion was regarding our scale, and we adjusted the criteria accordingly. Beyond this, we also created an engineering design matrix for us to compare our proposed ECM solutions with the current system in place at Raytheon. We will also input the data into Excel to view the ECM weights holistically. Lastly, our team has been reviewing the current solution at Raytheon to better understand its shortcomings and what to develop in order to make sure the same issues don’t arise again. 

In addition to this, our team is also hard at work preparing our product design review presentation in anticipation of our visit to Raytheon’s headquarters. We currently have a preliminary draft completed for the PDR report, and we have been utilizing that to curate the content for the presentation. Our team also now has a PowerPoint theme to use for all presentations going forward! We are extremely excited for our PDR presentation and can’t wait to receive feedback on our mock presentation next week! 

This week we’ve been hard at work on our enterprise content management (ECM) trade study to find a replacement system for Raytheon’s current solution. We’ve been working with our liaisons to identify and weigh the requirements and criteria, and we have been working on preparing a formal trade study document to present. Because one of the most important aspects of our project is deciding on which product to use, we’ve been very careful when researching solutions and weighing them against our criteria. We hope to complete our trade study by next week and present it to our liaisons. After completing our trade study, we hope to begin setting up our development environment and planning our prototype system. We will begin planning and designing our frontend solution that integrates with our chosen ECM.

This week, our team started work on finalizing our team logo and team name. We received feedback from the other IPPD project teams and have decided that, while our team name is finalized, our logo will need to be modified so it is easier to see on a light background. In addition to this, we concluded our statement of work and have finished determining the project stakeholders using the information we received from our liaisons.

We have also started conducting our initial research of alternatives to the current enterprise content management (ECM) system used at Raytheon, and are assessing the different publicly available options that meet the needs of the project. While we have already began researching alternatives, our next goal is to set up a software environment that emulates Raytheon’s current system. This will allow us to more easily decide on replacement solutions and develop them in a secure environment. Because our project relies on us developing on approved Raytheon hardware, we also are awaiting access to their approved hardware and systems so we can begin a detailed trade study.

Hello everyone, welcome to our team blog for ReptileRepo! We are a team working for Raytheon Technologies through the IPPD program, and this page will outline our updates and progress as we work on our action items for the next two semesters. Our team consists of four undergraduate computer science students: Alex Good, Eric Szoke, Faizan Mohammad, Hunter Lawson, our faculty coach, Ann Ramirez, and our company liaisons, Cari Majors and Mark Sanders. Our project title is Multi Level Content Repository Modernization, and we are extremely excited to take on this challenge and share our progress with you all!

In our first week working, we became familiar with each other as a team and discussed logistical items such as our availabilities, meeting times, and delegating responsibilities for assignments and action items. Our first main task was to read over and gain an understanding of our statement of work and getting familiar with the project details and what research we need to complete. Next week, we hope to finalize our team logo and begin our trade study of backend technologies that could assist us in our work.