This week Team Stratagem presented to our second Quality Review Board (QRB) and continued finalizing our preliminary finished product and continued preparing for our site visit and user interviews at CAE. Since our first Quality Review Board we have strived to better explain our project problem and how our application will solve the problem. We met Sunday night and before the presentation on Tuesday to review and rehearse our presentation, and had a much improved Quality Review Board 2. The Board agreed that our solution will solve CAE’s problem and that we are on track to complete our application. After that, we then shifted to merging all of our changes and GitHub branches into a single product that we can present in 2 weeks, and also began preparing for our site visit to CAE in 2 weeks. Next week we will continue merging our changes and fixing bugs or other issues, and will also continue preparing for user reviews of our current solution.

Team Picture after QRB 2

This week Team Stratagem continued finalizing our application, began preparing for the Quality Review Board Presentation next week, and finalized our visit to CAE’s headquarters to present our progress and receive feedback and user testing. A major addition to our application is assigning progress states to each task, which indicate whether a task is complete, in-progress, or not yet started. We also added a colored pie chart to show the current status of every task as well as the ability to change Gantt chart colors from make or buy decisions to instead show the task status. Next week we may add additional task states, such as on-time or delayed. We are currently preparing a demonstration video to show to our Quality Review Board as well as to showcase our current status to CAE project managers for feedback. On Friday we met with our liaisons to present our current progress and ask for suggestions to improve our prototype. This weekend we plan to meet to rehearse and review our QRB presentation and also meet sometime next week before our presentation to rehearse again.

Task Status Pie Chart:

We are about a third of the way through the spring semester as of today. This week Team Stratagem continued to improve our application’s user interface and our application’s backend, not directly visible to the user. We are working on beginning user testing of our prototype application and we have made some important decisions as to how our application will function. We are preparing a video demonstration to send to our liaisons at CAE, who will then forward the video to other CAE project managers, and will also send us their feedback. We are also tentatively organizing a site visit in March but this is preliminary. Our original implementation idea of our application was a client-server model where end users accessed the application on their device, but most computations and data storage would happen on a central server. Fortunately modern computers are fast and we are now planning to do computations and store results on the user’s local machine, and enable CAE engineers to expand to server storage if needed. It is not easy to show our new intended backend implementation, so we have screenshots of our current UI below. Will, Caleigh, and Rachel have done an amazing job on improving user views and editability of project schedules.

This week Team Stratagem reviewed our Quality Review Board feedback, continued implementing our application, and assigned roles for our Final Design Report’s (FDR) 5 Volumes. After our Quality Review Board 1 presentation we decided to always introduce our sponsor CAE and their problem which we intend to solve. Our front-end team Rachel, Caleigh, and Will have done an exceptional job in implementing and improving our User Interface based on our liaisons’ feedback. Matthew and Yuri have worked on our back-end algorithms and database. Our preliminary database schema is featured below. We hope to start user testing within the next few weeks with CAE project managers, our intended end users. This week we also assigned roles for the FDR’s submittable volumes. We will begin working on the volumes next week, and also hope to start the process for user testing in the next few weeks.

Preliminary Database View:

This week Team Stratagem delivered our Quality Review Presentation to a group of 3 judges. We met on Sunday to finalize our slide order and content and met again on Tuesday before our presentation to review and practice. Unfortunately not every member of our team was able to present due to illness, but we all worked together on the presentation. A recurring issue that we have is that we do not provide our audience with enough context about our sponsor company CAE USA, the problem we are facing, and our end users’ current solution to their problem. Going forward, we will spend several minutes at the beginning of our presentations giving necessary context to our audience.

Hello everyone! Team Stratagem is coming to you with new edits to our UI. Our team has worked diligently to complete a Time-Only Feasibility Visualization and What-If Scenario Creation UI.

Below is a picture of the UI. On the left hand side, users can see the version of the schedule they are working on. In the middle is a Gantt-Chart like view of the Bill of Materials data. Clicking on the tasks opens up a sidebar of the details of each task, such as level number, time needed for the task, resource availability, etc.

Our team will be finalizing this UI in the coming weeks with our liaisons and completing first-round user testing to get Stratagem up and running as soon as possible! Any feedback is appreciated.

Welcome to 2026 everyone! This week Team Stratagem identified where we are in the software design process and determined our next steps for this semester. Last semester we worked on interviews, research, and low-fidelity prototyping. This semester we will move past low-fidelity prototyping to create (and test) our final product. Our application will have a Python back-end and potentially have a client-server architecture to move heavy computations off of user laptops and towards a central server. Below is a tentative timeline for our project.

Spring Semester Critical Path: