During the 1st year, Computing students take part in Computing in Business week. Greta Kuzminskaite, a BSc (Hons) Software Engineering student blogged about her experience of CiB week, and what her group did during the week to give an insight into what CiB week is as part of the Business Systems Analysis and Design unit (BSAD).

To give you some context, CiB week is a week where you work on BSAD (Business system analysis and design) unit for a week, working in groups that have been randomly assigned to students. The aim to to create a pitch and a prototype design of an interface for the client.

Interviews:

Greta with her team after the interviews

At the beginning of CiB week, we were given a scenario and client requirements from our client JP Morgan. When we got our scenarios, my group and I met up to discuss the requirements in the scenario and we came up with questions to ask the staff of JP Morgan to gain more requirements that could be useful for the group during the week when creating an application.

We had three interviews in total with three different team members that gave us insights to how they worked on specific parts in the company. The three teams were resiliency, application and operators. Our group then worked on putting all the requirements together and putting the questions together, so that the interview questions and answers were ready for Tuesday.

The first CiB day:

The first day launched with a lecture at 9 in the morning, which gave us some useful information. We then got together in our group to start working. Me and my group started working on multiple tasks to create our designs and we all end up helping each other throughout the day. As a group, we struggled having one place to stay to do the work, so my group ended up moving between different rooms. During the day we decided on how to approach the way we complete the work.  We agreed that this was going to be by assigning work to ourselves and splitting into programmers and document based. The programmers worked on programming the functionality of our system/site, whilst the rest of us were doing either the documentations or the designing of the prototypes.

The second CiB day:

On the second day of CiB week, we distributed more tasks, and worked on them individually and got other team members to look through the work when it was complete to see if anything else should be added to the tasks. Each work got completed with a few things left for the last day. During the day we worked as a team to make sure everyone had some kind of work they can be working on, whilst some of us were helping each other with some other tasks. We have figured out a room to stay and work in for two hours, but then had to swap rooms and decided to go to the library with the group, where we have decided was the best place to stick to, to do the work together.

The third CiB day:

In the morning we completed the last design documents. There were the last data flow diagrams and use-case diagrams and some designing parts of the website. The programming kept going to create some functionality in the system. As the programmers finish the programming part, I compile the work we did and zip the file to be able to upload it on time to Brightspace. As a team, we made sure to help each other if we got stuck on anything.

Greta and her team on exhibition day.

The exhibition:

The exhibition was held on a Friday, where everyone got allocated a specific area to set up their work to present to the invigilators. Once all the groups set up their work, we started having people come talk to my group about what we have done and what we have created. We received positive feedback from many people and despite feeling exhausted, we were very proud of ourselves.

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