Assesments for the tools we used

Tools for Collaboration

Github

Collaboration: Github was the platform for collaboration, organizing the group work and documentation. We have benefited the standard wiki features as well as the code repository.

Issue tracking features contributed to the team work and increased our efficiency. Using Discussions feature we made it possible to make decisions in a much more efficient and creative way.

Source control: We made use of code repository to share and deploy design elements by third party tools. This also made possible to track the work and cooperate without loss of data, information or design.

Use of a centralized repository also made possible to use hyperlinks for related documents within the group's work. Using markdown as an authoring standard, made copying text between discussions, issue evaluations, wiki pages even comments possible.

Another feature of Github, which was useful for organizing team work is the use of templates. Templates for different areas of documentation (meeting notes, issue, team member pages) increased the standards and group communication.

Last but not least, putting all the work on an online tool (which provides flexible and visual elements also) is a must for modern day projects.

Discord

Issue tracking and Discussion features are not as flexible and quick as any realtime communication tool. But any realtime communication tool has the draw back of introducing information loss and distraction. Without neglecting this, we made use of discord and whatsapp for fast communication on details. Discord was also the tool for quick communication with our instructors.

Whatsapp

Mainly used for meeting confirmations and other daily human interactions.

Zoom for video conferences and online meetings

Being a tool widely used for online meetings, zoom provided us the facility to recruit team members to meetings which were not possible for them to join face to face. Zoom was also useful to organize short quick discussions which are crucial for efficient collaboratin.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Zoom

• Advantages
  • Having a well developed engine, Zoom well optimizes the simultaneous talks by many members at the same time.
  • Sharing user screen, documents, links (via chat feature) is useful
• Disadvantages
  • Limited meeting times

Design and documentation tools

Lucid charts

After a short trial period on diagrams.net we decided to use lucid for our design work:

• Mockups (diagrams.net and Lucid)
• UML Designs including:
  • Use cases
  • Use case diagram
  • Sequence diagrams
  • Class diagrams

Advantages and Disadvantages of Lucid

• Advantages
  • Real time collaboration provides real time collaboration.
  • Design templates provided are useful
  • Training supports with videos are useful
• Disadvantages
  • Direct integration with github repositories are missing
  • Limitations exist for free education package.

ProjectLibre

:-)