Week 8 - What I learned

05/31/2021 - 06/07/2021

I've gotta say that this week was so productive that the system changed a lot and we finally got really good comments from the client about the system and the progress. I think that this was our week, we did a lot and learned a lot. Here I'm going to write down what happened during the week first, I'm going to start telling you the goals of the week, how was work during the week, problems we faced, solutions that we found to those problems, results, and lessons learned. Just want to say that this was the last week working in this phase and project.

The goals of the week

After showing the demo, we got a lot of work to cover throughout the week, we had a redefined scope, which is a simplified version. These were big changes to make... we had to finish in one week what we didn't do in week two plus the week's 3 work. That was the goal to finish week 2 and 3 work in one week, which are now simplified. This is the last week so we also need to leave documentation for other developers to come and understand what we did. That's it! Let's get to it!.

How we worked.

As you all know we found a way of organization to do things and that fits us. Well, we continued using our boards in Trello and keep separating user stories into smaller tasks that each team member could do by themselves. This was, in general, the way of working, just little changes like everyone should be working in something, doesn't matter if this was front or back end.

At this point is important to mention two things, the first one was that we tried to do all the tasks needed for the week, but this is kind of impossible because we didn't have the whole overview of what we needed to do. As we kept working we discovered that there were a lot of things more to do, so we just added them to the board.

Another thing to note in our way of working is that we didn't have a lot of technical issues as we expected, we helped each other and if we had a major issue the mentors were always there to help us. We also had a different rhythm, I mean we were more efficient and faster this week.

Problems we faced

1. Not knowing what to do or how to negotiate with the client the scope of the project. We didn't have clue on how to simplify the scope and we need it to do this because we didn't have the time to finish everything.

2. Not having experience in security and deployment using JWT.

3. Not having a unit or any kind of testing and we had to do manual testing and we found bugs final builds of the application.

Solutions that we found

1. We asked the staff and some mentors how to solve this problem and we found different solutions and approaches, we learn a couple of things here. We listened to everything and finally, we took the ideas that could work with the client. But the important thing here is that we found multiple solutions and we tried to choose the correct one for the situation.

2. We did research first and finally, we got help from mentors and we learned how protocols and security work in general.

3. First of all we didn't have the time to do unit testing or any kind of automated testing. We had to do manual testing, which is not something bad, it is necessary. But the point here is that we manage to find some bugs within the app and we just had to write them down as tickets and then find the solution for those bugs. In the end, fixing bugs took time and effort so this is something that we have to take in mind in any development.

Results

At the end of the week we got:

• The system with new modules, the complete scope could be finished.
• A system manually tested.
• The code.
• Tickets for enhancements that could be done

Lessons learned

We can negotiate almost everything, with almost I mean the client doesn't want to lose part of a system or scope, but you can instead find a way to simplify things other things that we learned from our mentors is that you can even negotiate how much work are you able to finish or the time that you need to finish. The point here is that you have to be clear and let other people know about your times and capabilities.

Sometimes at work, you have to do things that you don't enjoy doing and is part of your job and is going to happen often but on the other hand, you will learn and sometimes you will be doing things that you like, so don't stress too much about it.

Doing manual and automated testing is important. Don't let the Titanic drown.