Project Vlog 1 Documentation

The Project Vlog is available on YouTube.

Team member introductions

1. Team Introduction: Let's go alphabetical: Clark Inocalla, Kelly Holtzman, Mansi Patel, Sana Khan
2. Team member's project role and responsibilities as envisioned now: Roles are further explained here

Scrum Master (Kelly) is responsible for leading Scrum ceremonies such as the daily scrum (stand-up), backlog refinement, sprint retrospective, etc.

Product Owner (Sana) is responsible for representing the client and building the product backlog - right now the backlog has not been started so the Product Owner is gathering requirements using various documentation tools.

Tech Hunters (Clark & Mansi) are responsible for investigating documentation and development tools for the team's use, and integrating them into GitHub if they so apply.

As the project is just beginning, once the roles other than Product Owner are satisfied with their work they are to assist the Product Owner work.

Project background & business need/opportunity

A more detailed context, background, and discussion of the business need of the project proposed is found here

1. The context and background history of the project:

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) is a federal government regulator that encompasses food safety, animal health, plant health and international market access. Animal health during transport is of particular concern to our proposed project; animal transportation records in Canada are presently written on paper manifests for each and every delivery of farm animals to regulated businesses.

The following excerpt is paraphrased from a conversation with our client:

"There are a number of documents that [animal transporters] have to keep... there is significant overlap in the information that the [animal transporter] is asked for (redundancy that is understandably annoying for the regulated party). One is a “livestock manifest” (there is some form of this required by each province, how the form looks varies between provinces and with the type of animal being shipped but basically the information required is[:] who is the producer, who is the driver, who is the buyer, how many animals, date [pf transport]). These types of manifest are needed to keep track of animals and where they end up for a variety of reasons including public health and food safety (so [the CFIA] can trace meat back to its farm-of-origin) and also for disease control purposes (so that [the CFIA] can do “contact tracing” and see which animal may have been exposed to which other animals in the case of a disease outbreak)."

2. The business need the project introduces:

Understandably (further to the above question) animal transporters are responsible for several, varied but similar, records of transport - with so many documents our client described to us the problem of pushing all the above-noted responsibilities upon transporters:

1. Regulations change frequently and can be difficult to understand,
2. some transporters are unaware of or do not use the interpretive guidance documentation available to them,
3. and the great number of different manifests transporters must fill out during transportation results in a higher chance of some information being missed.

Recall from our project proposal that our proposed application will be to replace the paper manifests of several regulated parties as an easy-to-use-and-understand mobile form(at) that meets the record keeping requirements of the Health of Animals Regulations Part XII, Humane transport of animals (sections 136-155).

Reason

The team's reason to create the project:

Our team has compiled the following as our foremost reasons for creating the proposed project:

1. We're moved by our client's business need: if the software solution we develop could be used to truly improve the quality of life of Canadian animal transporters then we're satisfied to have created and championed such a solution.
2. We're a team of students looking to use what we have learned from our software engineering education (the programming skills, project management, team management, and economical, ethical, and decision-making skills) to provide for persons searching for software solutions to their problems.
3. A project is required of us for a particular post-secondary course: we searched our community and industry for proposals and encountered our client's request for a solution that we believe we can create (further to point 1).

Impact

[Filling in the details] and discussing the statement: "When we are done [our current reality] will now be [our new reality] so we think we need to [action step]".

Who

1. Who is the audience?

We're creating our project for Canadian animal transporters, first and foremost. There also exists secondary parties whose opinions we may consider, including that of our client (who partly represents Canadian animal transporter interests), project mentors and supervisor(s), and other interested parties introduced.

2. Whose opinion matters?

The envisioned users of our software are animal transporters using the software to replace their existing workflow; our software should meet their expectations for use, ease-of-use, and understanding. Secondary party opinions may be humored as long with priority given to animal transporters in conflicting opinions.

3. Who do we want to reach with our work?

Our client has expressed their purpose for the project is to present it as proof-of-concept to the CFIA that the existing paper-focused records for Canadian animal transport should be changed to digital format. If the project were to be adopted the existing recording processes of industry stakeholders, regulated parties, and the CFIA may change.

4. Where is the audience: in the same room, city, province, across the globe?

As the CFIA regulates animal transport within Canada, our audience is therefore located within Canadian provinces. Out-of-province parties may be involved - those parties therefore subject to Canadian regulations.

5. Where does the audience get their information (paper, digital, opinion, peer-reviewed, etc.)?

Current animal transportation regulations are made available on paper (within the organization) and the CFIA website(s), for example the online pamphlet available to transporters is located here (and is subject to change).

What

Discuss the type of constraints and limitations the team envisions with the project.

Mobile applications used to record data often have the data stored off-site in a database after the form is submitted.

1. Our project is not affiliated or endorsed by the CFIA, and as such there is no client-owned and operated database for our application to communicate with to store data.
2. Thus our team will be responsible to either utilize a private database for the software to communicate, provide a similar storage solution (such as local storage on the device or email the form), or emulate a data storage solution in place of a database.

Our team is four students whose time is also used by family matters, employment matters, and other post-secondary courses; our team members are not available for contact and work at all times. Outside matters primarily affect our Sprint schedules and the number of viable product increments we push out.

3. There is a possibility we may not complete all the product increments needed for a complete project due to outside influences (it should be noted that it is promised that enough work to act as proof-of-concept shall be available at the end of the project timeline (TBA)).