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The DesignFest '97 Experience
As has become tradition, the DesignFest was successful. We had 11 teams and over 70 (up ten since 1996) people participated this year. The overall impression was that things ran rather smoothly.
All groups showed good productivity and we did not have the large differences that we encountered last year. This year we did not have prepared/unprepared and that worked out well. The scheduling was much simpler this way. A few people asked for the problems beforehand.
Recommendations for next year
- The event ran very smooth and everybody seemed happy. Personally, I would like to have some more thrill in next years DesignFest.
- Participation is still too low. For an event with 2500 participants, I think we should be able to drag in more people. DesignFest had much more exposure in the program than before, but we did not have much more participants. Next year, DesignFest will become an option on the registration form.
- The "simple" Client server problem from Ward was very popular. This is the first non-domain oriented problem we had. The problems were not are availabe before people made their choice so the choice is independent of the description quality. Maybe we should focus more on technical problems than on doman analysis problems.
- Making the final reports and creating the web site is hard when the DesignFest is over. Maybe we should plan a number of hours on the last day to do this work so that we are free after the OOPSLA.
Participation
Problem
Author
Sunday
Tuesday
Total
Client server
Ward Cunningham
2 teams
13 persons3 teams
18 persons*****
..............................Video Store manager
Doug Bennet
1 team
5 persons1 team
6 persons**
...........Stock Exchange
Torsten Layda
1 team
7 persons2 teams
14 persons***
.....................Personal Expense manager
Gail Harris & Henry Baragar
no team
1 team
7 persons*
.......Evaluation forms
Filled in by:
Designers 37 ************************************ Recorders 9 ********* Moderators 7 ******* Authors 1 *Will join DesignFest 97
Definitely 21 ****************** Probably 25 ********************** Unsure 7 ******* Probably not 1 * Definitely not 0Have you learned anything about OO systems
Definitely 25 ********************** Probably 19 **************** Unsure 7 ******* Probably not 1 * Definitely not 0Good
- Interaction with and meeting other interesting people
- Brainstorming
- Design problems
- Learning about java (!)
- Learned about a problem domain
Bad
- Not enough time
- Documentation should be earlier (1 day)
- More group building efforts
- Lack of direction/focus initially
- Lack of clear deliverables
- Bad pretzels (!)
- No whiteboard
- Groups too big
- No equipment
- Design problems vague and/or too big
- No tutorial lunch included
What was the worst thing about DesignLab 96 (last year)?
Time frame 11 ********** (no improvement) Cookies/water/temp 7 ********* (much better) The group 6 ****** (better) Unclear deliverables 4 **** (much better) Organization 3 *** (better) Problem 1 * (noise) Preparation 1 * (noise) No expert 1 * (noise)