This week was our on-site visit to RTX to present our PDR! Together, with team Banary, we traveled to Largo and gave our PDR presentations to our liaisons and other members of the RTX team. In the days leading up, we practiced our presentation and made any final tweaks from the peer review session to improve it as much as possible. The presentation went very well and we received valuable feedback and questions from our liaisons and audience. Banary presented second and also did great! We were able to see how their presentation changed since the peer review session and the feedback they received. After the presentation, we had lunch with the sponsors and it was time for the tour! We had an amazing time touring the site and talking to all of the wonderful people at RTX. A on-site PDR presentation feedback memo was also completed based on comments and questions received on-site.

This week we also got access to the Hatchery! The Hatchery is a workspace at Innovate where a local environment is provided for us to begin development on ATOM. Having this workspace will be incredibly beneficial and very exciting for the team.

Special thanks to Joseph Foraker, Alex Good, Kathryn Frain, John Kennedy, and the rest of the RTX crew for hosting us this week.

This week was big for the Quarks. We have a date for our on-site visit! This upcoming Tuesday, October 22, the Quarks will travel to Largo, FL to visit the RTX site and give our final PDR presentation! We have been reviewing and editing our PDR and PDR presentation to ensure it is ready to show our sponsors. We are so excited to travel as a team and present what we have been working on. Additionally, we got access to the Innovation building which houses the Hatchery. This will be our new workstation for the duration of the ATOM project. Today, we met with our liaisons to go over any questions we had for the visit and presentation. We are feeling confident and excited to hit this milestone for the project! We have created a Figma project and started creating sprints and tasks using Jira. This software will help us view the tasks we need to complete and organize the project in a manageable and clean fashion. Next week we are hoping to start prototyping!

This week the Quarks presented the Preliminary Design Review for ATOM. This was our first presentation on the content of our project and we were so excited to show it off. Together we helped improve our communication and public speaking as well as how our team works off each other. We received good feedback from a couple of the other teams including the other RTX team, Banary. The presentation went well but there is always room for improvement so all feedback is valued by our team. We have made a list of changes and improvements to the PDR based on the peer feedback.

Unfortunate another hurricane hit Florida and the university was closed for 2 days this week. Additionally, the hurricane made landfall right over Largo, where our liaisons at RTX reside. We are all hoping for minimal damage and that everyone is safe. However, this means our meeting with the liaisons is canceled and our on-site visit is TBD. Hopefully this is the last of the hurricanes this season and we can’t wait to get back on track!

Another week of hard work for the Quarks. Today we met up with Banary and Dr. Resch to discuss dates for the on-site visit to RTX in Largo. Due to certain constraints such as availability, it is not guaranteed that our visits will coincide. Additionally, we met with our liaisons Joseph and Alex to talk about the progress of the project. Our availability for the on-site visit is being reviewed along with our access to the Hatchery. Updates on the testing resources should also be coming soon!

The PDR is the main focus for our team as well as creating the system architecture. Multiple concepts have been discussed and compared to find the best option. Our currently proposed solution is to deliver the testing suite through a desktop application. This was chosen for both it’s customization and maintainability. The system architecture for the solution was also created, detailing the different layers of the solution and how they interact with each other. The PDR presentation is our main focus and we are excited to received feedback from our peers this Tuesday!

It’s been a busy week! Career showcase was earlier this week and Hurricane Helene was later. A project roadmap was created along with a preliminary project plan. We are researching manual and automated testing case studies, competitive products, and relevant software standards. In class, we had an elevator pitch to present the team, the project, and our project plan. Team roles have been split into two groups; permanent and rotational. The list for each weeks roles is included above!

Unfortunately, Hurricane Helene has caused multiple roadblocks in our plans this week. Campus was closed Thursday and Friday and the team hunkered down to await the storms passing. We had to delay a meeting with our liaisons Friday morning and reschedule it to next Friday. Access to the Hatchery and RTX process information is still tentative. Our new logo and team name however, have been approved by one of our liaison engineers!

After receiving feedback from our peers, the team name was changed from The Quarks to Quarks. Changes were also made to our logo, removing the monitor and changing the colors of the bug and the circles on the atom to Red, Green, and Blue, the 3 colors that make up monitors. A draft for our project’s roadmap was made to give us a preliminary schedule to work off of along with the creation of a risk table and corresponding mitigation strategies for each risk.

This week we also had our first meeting with the other team sponsored by Raytheon Technologies, Banary. We have biweekly meetings set up with them and the coach for both of our teams, Cheryl Resch. It was great to see another software team and we are looking forward to seeing their progress at the next meeting in two weeks. Together, our teams are trying to schedule a trip down to the RTX site down in Largo, FL!

Welcome to the third week of our project! This week the team got dressed up and professional! We worked on closing into the Scope of Work for ATOM and gathered more information on our project objectives and goals. A rough draft of the Product Design Specifications was made mapping out our project requirements, specifications, and the importance of each of those specifications. We also developed a more detailed stakeholder’s model matching the project wants and needs to each stakeholder. The team logo and name were posted online, and we will make revisions based on the peer feedback received.

This week we also met with our Sponsors! We met with our liaison Joseph Foraker, our backup liaison Alexander Good, and our coach Cheryl Resch where we discussed the aim of the project, expectations, goals, resources, and future contact options. After asking the liaisons all the questions we had, the team definitely has a clearer idea of the project and what is expected of us. We also learned we will gain access to the Hatchery, a secure workspace provided by our liaisons where most of the work will take place. We are super excited to check it out and continue furthering this project!

First drafts of our team logo

Welcome to The Quarks team and blog site! Here we will have weekly updates on what we have accomplished and what we are working on next. We are working on the software project Automated Testing Operations Monitor (ATOM) sponsored by Raytheon Technologies. Our team includes Kyle Ho-Nguyen, Dean Alvarez, Ignacio Bigott, Adrienne Brady, Nathan Gilman, Jason Hao, Jaden Lindner, our coach Cheryl Resch, Executive Sponsor Kathryn Frain, Primary Liaison Engineer Nathan Fraenkel, and Back-Up Liaison Engineer Joseph Foraker.

This week we had our first initial team meeting where we assigned team roles and responsibilities, drafted a team name and logos, and setup a weekly meeting time. Later on in the week we met with our coach who will help guide us through the process and determined a recurring meeting time each week with our coach.

Next, we are scheduling a meeting with the Liaison Engineer to discuss the project details, direction, and hopefully start working on it. We are so excited to be a part of IPPD and this project and can’t wait to get started!