week seven
july 25 - july 29


Monday, July 25:

I drove in from my brother's house in New York this morning, so I didn't get very much work done.  But I did get to update my website and work on the Chemo glossary a little bit, since we had the Baystate visit last Friday.  I also got a chance to print out some papers on Perspective research in requirement solicitation and processes, so those should be interesting to read.



Tuesday, July 26:

I read two papers today: one on Scenario-Based Requirements Analysis and the other on multiple views in requirements specifications.  Both were interesting...but hard to understand since I don't know the most basic concepts in the papers.  I need to read more to figure out what's going on.  I also started to rework the Chemotherapy process in LittleJIL...and realized that these meetings with Baystate are not as productive as they should be.  There are a couple definite issues associated with dealing with medical professionals: namely, they aren't computer scientists, which isn't a problem, but the fact that we have no means of clearly communicating data to them is a major problem.  For instance, in these Baystate meetings, I have been printing out the LittleJIL diagrams which look like complicated flowcharts in the form of a hierarchical tree.  Trees are basic in computer science.  The topmost node in a tree is known as the parent, conveying the most general information (if any), then as the children branch off below the parent, more specific data is conveyed, with the most important, hard data residing in the children leaf nodes.  Top to bottom, left to right is immediately obvious for computer scientists.  For the medical professionals, they show immediate frustration at having to flip through three printed pages of diagrams to reach the depth of the first leaf node.  This is an annoyance computer scientists are willing to swallow, but as a medical professional, they see no reason in it.  It is true I am new to the act of capturing processes, but I do not think it is logical to speak to the doctors, pharmacists, and nurses in our language (mathematical diagrams) and have them reply in their language (medical terminology).  We need to take a different approach to bridge the gap, and I'm still not really sure what that approach is.  I have a meeting with George tomorrow so I hope we get to discuss that.  Plus I need to talk to him about the final DMP paper!



Wednesday, July 27:

 Today I met with George to talk about what I've been doing in the past week.  We talked about the Chemotherapy process, and how the meetings were going at Baystate, and I expressed concern over our ways of communicating the information conveyed in our process.  He was very helpful in suggesting alternatives to presenting the data, and encouraged me to take a different approach with the Medical Professionals because it can only help process elucidation for future cases.  George also went into detail to explain how Computer Science papers get submitted, reviewed, and presented at research conferences.  I never knew so much went into reviewing a major piece of work, and I didn't even know the difference between a paper published in a journal and one published from a conference.  We talked about graduate schools, too...well what else is new?  Haha...yep that's always on my mind these days.  What to study, where to go, who to work with...I don't know how to answer any of these questions yet.  I really like software engineering, but do I like it enough to pursue it in depth for years and years?  Probably.  I don't know anything about hardware, and I feel like I really struggle in math...and I haven't seen any combinations of Computer Science and Statistics before, since I think Stat is a basic part of any good research, so that really doesn't help too much.  Well I do know one thing for sure:  I love majoring in Computer Science as an undergraduate.  I definitely think I picked the best major...problem solving, logical thinking, a little bit of engineering, stepping back to see how the big picture all fits together...I think some people give Computer Science a bad rap.  The title 'Computer Science' really doesn't do justice to what's actually studied in the field.  It's so much more than computers, and maybe not a whole lot of science...either way, it is very deceiving to those thinking about majoring in it.  And I don't think I could have done anything else.  I don't like animals too much...I've seen surgeries and they gross me out...chemistry doesn't make any sense...I don't have the patience to pursue a degree in Psychology...I struggle with Math...I can't remember names, dates, or historical events...modern business practices don't interest me...well it looks like I'm stuck with computers! 



Thursday, July 28:

Today I printed out all the previously typed notes I had from past Baystate visits so I could attempt to organize them in some type of searchable way.  That didn't work.  Too much of the notes I took overlaps between agents, artifacts, actions....organizing them in categories is near impossible.   I hope I can think of a way to pass the work associated with this process on to the next person on the project.
 


Friday, July 29:

Fridays mean Medical Safety Meetings.  We discussed (at length) a new approach to presenting the process to the Medical Professionals, and established that there has never been a set way of doing this.  No one is in agreement about how to start, either.  Well I'm working really hard on this, and while it might not be exactly what the LASER lab expected to get, I'm trying to make it as accurate as possible.  I still believe that it is more important that I capture the process as accurately as I can, instead of attempting to teach the language that the process is represented in to the folks at Baystate.  We have a visit on Monday, so we'll see how this new approach goes.  A LASER meeting immediately followed that meeting, since a lot of people were on vacation and such, so we got it out of the way.

Now, I'm off to the horse races of Saratoga Springs, NY!  I'll post pictures one of these days.