Achievement

During the project’s ideation phase, it was hard to imagine the sheer quantity of functionalities that would be required (see Moscow table below). Eight subsystems had to be designed, implemented, and tested, and many of them required multiple iterations to be completed. Their delivery was an enormous challenge, and it was achieved with tremendous effort from our team. Furthermore, the drawing mechanism that was created is completely unique and original. In our view, our greatest accomplishment was ideating and implementing this mechanism, as it is a completely novel form of human computer interaction.

The development process began quite slowly, as none of the team members had experience using C#, XAML, or Visual Studio. By January, the team had become more familiar with these tools, however, given the desired scope of the project, a very large amount of development needed to be done in little time. Therefore, delivering features was prioritised over quality assurance. As a result, the code hygiene is satisfactory, but qualities such as code efficiency, naming conventions, and code readability could be improved. In addition, a lot of the early development was made under the assumption that the final product would not stray from the original plan, which was not the case. If the initial structure had been made more flexible, the system’s architecture would likely be more elegant and efficient.

Avant-Garde is a system with many interconnected moving parts, which were simultaneously developed from different locations. To manage this, team meetings were held regularly and communication happened daily. Although these processes prevented any major blunders, inconsistencies between code branches and bugs related to component integration still arose occasionally. This could also have been improved by having a strict, test-driven code management protocol.