Answer the following questions considering the learning outcomes for
Make sure to record evidence of your processes. You can use code snippets, screenshots or any other material to support your answers.
Do not fill in the feedback section. The Founders and Coders team will update this with feedback on your progress.
- Learned to work for a client, as a product owner, within a scrum type work methodology - liaising with Eleanor day-to-day with questions and feedback as we learned more about scrum. The project was already quite well scoped but we helped to nail down the vision with a bit more clarity by breaking it down into user stories with the product owner and asking her to prioritise them. This helped us to manager her expectations as we were better able to accurately define an MVP for the end of the project.
- Most of the team have been working on the figma design for several weeks prior to this week, so UI/UX was quite thought-through. Where I was able to add value was in identifying ways in which certain UX features can be implemented withuin the project, for instance suggesting to use ThreeJS for 3D rendering and eventually using Plotly to render graphs in 3D space, which was implemented and showcased to the product owner by the end of the week. After which the product owner let us in on user testing she had been conducting and how they interacted with the "cube" graph, which will inform the next iteration of it as we develop this further next week.
- From the beginning, we decided to truly be agile in our workflow and implement something closer to scrum in a real workplace. We defined our sprint deliverables for week 1 which was to have a skeleton UI working, an offline database and a PWA downloadable on the user's phone. We assigned scrum roles that would actually have a significance on how we work, Jack and I would be QAs while Jason would be scrum master (later the role was passed over to Tanya).
- We exceeded our MVP for the week and were able to deliver a bit more to the product owner and next week this will help us calculate the velocity of our team (in points), which once we assign points to the user stories provided by the product owner we can plan the next sprint with more information.
2. Show an example of some of the learning outcomes you have struggled with and/or would like to re-visit.
- Considering there were a lot of new technologies we were using, we expected that we would have achieved a lot less than we were actually able to (possibly down to a strong focus on spike at the beginning of the week to get to grips with those). However, this meant that our sprint target was not accurate - although I still argue it is best to overdeliver than underdeliver when promising to the product owner. This will inform the targets for next week;'s sprints and possibly we will have a better calibration.
- Our internal team dynamics were tense, we are all more informed now about how a project can be done and therefore hold stronger opinions about how they should be done. The team was often arguing about details that are just that - a matter of opinions rather than focusing on the work and I hold my hands up as being one who will always offer a "better" way of doing something (according to me!), but I see that as part of my job as QA. My problem is to articulate my ideas better so that when someone disagrees, I know they have understood what they are disgreeing with and can accept it. I have told my team now I will always make these suggestions, just say no if you don't want to do it :)
- One solution to the problem above as QA is to write a comprehensive set of standards from the beginning and get the team to agree on those before doing any work, that way when QAing it can be a reference rather than someone's opinion (a good reference for this would be Kindly)
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