Our Demo

Well, demo night at Vertical Power was a bust. On Monday 12/11/06 at 7:00pm we hit the class deadline for showing functionality of the Small Switch Panel to Kevin. We will continue work on this project over the break but that isn't relevant at this point and for our class purpose.

We were doing well by Monday afternoon. There were issues with the communication system but we had reasonable functionality. We were sending and responding to messages and could show nearly all of the priority 1 items were met. We had most of the priority 2 ready to test and had seen succesful responses to several of these already. This still would put us well behind our original and even our revised schedules but at least we could show that some of what we did worked.

Alas, and I should know this, I did not commit the semi-working version to SourceSafe. While attempting to resolve comm issues I ended up breaking the communication software. When it was time to demo for Kevin, instead of sending a single message the SP would send many repeats of the same message, any responses were very sluggish if they occurred at all, and basically... we bit the dust. We weren't able to demonstrate even the most basic functionality. In another world I would have been up all night working with the system to get functionality back but we had missed our deadline and I had kids that needed to be put to bed. The looming and unshakable deadline of having quality documentation to submit for our class grade also took over and we had to bite the bullet and take whatever grade our work will earn us.

I am not a quitter. The final deadline for Vertical Power to have a fully tested and robust SP system is mid January and I am looking forward to solving the challenges remaining before us.