Dear friends,

This semester is fast-approaching to the end. The end term for 2014 – 15 team members: Charlotte, Gaoxin and Yue as developers on AUT UpStage Team.

On behalf of 2014 – 15 members, I express our sincerest gratitude for all your support and advice. We could not achieve much without your care.

As the QA of my team, I hope to share team’s vision with you in the last year’s work:

• In contrast to team’s first half of UpStage project activities, team largely improved its productivity in both research areas and the current V3 maintenance work. Team concludes frequent communication with our client definitely helped team to deliver values to UpStage project.
• We are aware of team members have different study tasks while participating Upstage project; we discovered that Lean/Kanban should be a good technique to limit “Work In Progress”. With limited tasks, team is likely to focus on solving the assigned high priority tasks first. In such way, team will avoid being overloaded by the incoming tasks. (As we are aware sometimes team experienced heavy workload). Hope this technique can help the future teams to achieve better outcomes.
• In the respect of methodology, team applied Design Science principles to form research stages. Team made adjustment on the research stages into a fixed timeframe. From our observation, Design Science’s workflow is very flexible, and such a flexible workflow could exceed the project’s timespan for any team, and thus delay the team’s results for the portfolio assessment. We recommend future teams should try to follow such principle in their research activities.
• Team identified some high priority issues interconnected. Issue ticket: #264 #253 #249 #230 #203 #254 #243 #238 from team’s github repository. All the issues indicate synchronization over multiple users. Team have discussed these issues, we may need to alter the “Save Stage” button (so that people would know the button is designed for rehearsals only). This will help team to monitor the issues in the future.

For UpStage, there is still a long way to go. We enjoyed our work throughout our term, and hope we can make some contribution in the future.

Sincerest regards

Problem Solver                    Quality Assurance               Team Member
Charlotte Paterson                 Yue Li                                     Gaoxin Huang