www.whatsfordinner.com

1. www.whatsfordinner.com Bryce Rodgers Kent Warner Matt Heckman

2. The Plan • Schedule was: • Iteration 1 development 10/14 thru 10/30 • Core of Classifier, DB initialized, blank web pages • Iteration 2 development 11/3 thru 11/15 • DB-website, db-classifier, add more pages (food, meal) • Iteration 3 development 11/18 thru 12/1 • Site populates DB, classifier recommends from DB, touch-up to pages & ‘extra’ pages/features (ya right…) • Test on the 12/2 Final fixes 12/4 thru 12/7

3. The Reality • Deliveries were: • Iteration 1 completed 11-9 • Most of it was finished days before 11-8 • Iteration 2 completed over T-giving break • Everything connected properly, now to add the guts • Iteration 3 not completed • Most important parts completed first: get recommendation using DB, navigation, pages/forms, add data to DB. • Test on 12/8 and 12/9 • Test doc started on 12/2, outlined test plan for last days

4. What was Delivered? • Register an account with the site • Engine which focuses on choosing what it knows you like • If it has nothing to go on, it will be random until it does • Each recommendation must be voted like/dislike • Engine can catch up to the user quickly • Recommends meals based on a scoring system + Bayesian probability • Records meals when you accept the recommendation • Header bar with navigation (most pages/links removed) • Add new data to the DB

5. What was left out? • Browse All Content Page • MealMap Calendar Page • ‘Launchy’/iTunes search-bar • Few degrees of freedom with respect to creating meals & food items • Determine taste-profile of user ahead of time • Score meals numerically rather than like/don’t like • Javascript to simplify data-entry • Nearly all ‘bells & whistles’ of the classifier including: • Recommend new meals (at request) User s ‘Reports a Meal’ • Recommend from within small sub-set of meals • User control over recommendation algorithm • Never launched on WWW • Recipes, ingredients, tracking what’s in your cupboard

6. What went well? • Diverse skillset, team members knew their domain well • GoogleChat and googleCode were very convenient • Good IDE and dev environment configuration • Good ideas, even if we had too many sometimes • Requirement/stakeholder analysis of the product • Team members are veterans of managed dev • Out-sourcing some of the data-gathering tasks • Design helped a lot with generating HTML

7. What Happened? • Fact that we were planning more than we could accomplish • Very few meetings after being ‘turned loose’ • 2 people live in CR • Inefficiencies with technology choices (servletsvsjsp, javascript) • So many ideas, almost 0 rejection of ideas, lead to conflicting views of how we were proceeding • Schedule was not very specific and wasn’t in the front of our minds • More specific deadlines, lean away from iterations toward builds

8. Risks • Recipes & data-driven product (amount of data such as meals, food items) • caused us to abandon the idea of tracking recipes or ingredients, and focus on general things (high risk, high impact) • Trade-off between generality & product uniqueness/value • GUI of a website blessing & a curse • Focus on acquiring data, clumsy to enter too much data on one page • Had ideas about how to solve problem, but cost a lot of time • Dev environment-related problems • This risk under-occurred, there could have been many more problems • Recommending based on each individual user’s history (data-driven) • Practical with research, and a high-profile site • Low time impacted the mitigation plan, causing this risk to occur • Feature Creep • Ohhh yeah… that happened • Lesson learned: reject ideas to avoid over-complicating, even if it seems narrow-minded • Gold-Plating • Either occurred a lot or none at all, depending on how you look at it • Team Distance • Catalyst risk, occurred • Risk Monitoring • Formally, didn’t happen too often • Lesson Learned: even after the project is over, monitoring risk has value