Construction Phase: A Pseudo-Staff Meeting

As you may remember from the inception phase, the construction phase was split into its 3 workflows. Therefore, this post will act as an overview of the entire phase and hopefully allow you to know what to expect in the coming weeks. In a large company, they would call this a staff meeting, but, seeing as I am the only one, that name is not really appropriate.

The entirety of the construction phase was planned to last 5 weeks. However, due to my early completion of the last two phases, I now have about 7 weeks. The time will be distributed like this:

• Design Workflow - 1 week
• Implementation Workflow - 5 weeks
• Testing Workflow - 1 week

I understand that these workflows are just names and they may mean nothing to you, so I shall explain them individually:

• Design Workflow

In this workflow, one does all the planning of the project. In my case, I will create all the UML diagrams I will need. Although some thought about programming will be done, no coding is written in this stage.

The cool part of this workflow is that, once completed, the implementation workflow is extremely simple because I only need to translate UML into C++ without any thought of the program's flow as it would have already been figured out.

As for blog posts, there should only be one, and it will display the various UML diagrams and provide explanations.

• Implementation Workflow

This is where the exciting stuff happens: the actual building! This includes writing the software and constructing the physical device. As this is the proverbial meat-and-potatoes of the project, there will be a lot of emphasis, and therefore, blog posts, on this workflow.

The posts will be split between the programming and the device. The programming should only have one post, but this may increase if I discover it is more difficult than first thought. The device posts will be split into the various systems (light system, water system, etc.) with one or two posts for each.

• Testing Workflow

If all goes well, this should only take a day. However, I am not naive enough to think it will work the first time. In fact, I am anticipating failure, therefore I allocated an entire week to fix unforeseen issues.

Unless things start to go really wrong, this workflow should only comprise of one post.

As I have been working on the design workflow since I finished the elaboration phase, it should be finished fairly soon. After that comes the actual building and, after that, the first trial run.