Week 1: Kicking Off the DETI Maker Lab Project
Welcome to the first update on the DETI Maker Lab project! This week was all about laying the groundwork and understanding the core of what we need to build. We kicked things off with a crucial meeting with our supervisor, prof. Diogo Gomes, and the lab technician. This was a great opportunity to get to know our main stakeholders: the students who will use the lab and the technician who manages it.
During the meeting, we took a deep dive into the current solution—a Wiki-based platform implemented back in 2018 by a previous group. While it has served the lab well, we identified several pain points that our project needs to solve:
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Complex workflows: The current equipment requisition process is too complex and inconvenient to handle.
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Data entry issues: Relying on Markdown for project creation leads to inconsistent data and slows everything down.
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Tracking difficulties: Because the system is cumbersome, usage drops, making equipment tracking harder than it should be.
To wrap up the week, we defined the expectations for our team—like integrating the Snipe-IT inventory system and replacing Markdown with form-based inputs. We also prepared and delivered our presentation describing Stage 1 of our work, which aligns with the "Inception" phase of our OpenUP methodology. It was a highly productive week, and we now have a clear vision of the problem statement!