LFGA Web

Week 5 - What I learned


Overview

This week was the start of a new phase where we are going to do different things. We have to build an APP or platform for somebody and we only have this month to do it, so we have to go through a lot of things so this is the first week of the month and this is how we started.



Agile practices

This was a series of videos about agile and I'm going to paste my notes here, about what I learned or notice:

Pair programming

Continuous integration

Frequent small solutions

Definition of Done

Burn-up charts.

TDD

Automated tests.

Planning poker

Retrospectives after iterations.

Sustainable pace

Success sliders

Prioritization using MOSCOW

Showcases

Standups

Big visible charts.

User stories

Antifragile

The optimism bias


Activities of this week.

We did a lot of things this week. The goal of this month is to build something from scratch, software to solve some problems, we got nothing. To start to build software we have to know what we want to build, so this is what we did this week, I'm just going to write down some activities here:

Interview, process and proposal.

The first part was to meet our clients and know what was the problem and the process of their work. We had an interview with them and asked a lot of questions about the process we didn't focus on the solution yet.

We really wanted to understand the process so we wrote it down and discuss it and this really helped us to understand a lot of things. We asked questions and finally, we identified the problems the pain points.

After understanding how things work, we sat down and found the scope of the solution, and tried to brainstorm everything and that's how we build the proposal, mixing everyone's ideas.

Requirements and taskboard.

To write down the requirements we used user stories and a user story is: a user story is an informal, natural language description of one or more features of a software system and should have the following points:

That's how we wrote down the requirements and tried to choose the ones for the first iteration.

To organize and separate the tasks we used a kanban board.

We have 7 columns in our kanban board:

Those are some things that we did to start coding.


Conclusions.

I have two main lessons for this week, the first one is that you don't start coding right away, you have to do a lot of things related to people and management to start a new project, so not everything is coding. Is a very hard task trying to think like a client, I mean when finding the solution for a problem it is not that easy to get to the solution that could fit your client's need so that's why you have to think like them and it is part of the project and it is not as easy at it seems.