Finishing Touches

Quick update on the progress. So today we met up in class, as always we had our usual stand-up meeting, I showed the team my final storyboard, and asked for any suggestions. The team said that they had been working on the story board and the video the last time they met, when I was absent.

Socrates mentioned a few problems that we were facing as a team in regards to the voice over being 3 minutes and 50 seconds which is too long, I volunteered to redo it, but in order for it to be shorter, I warned them that we would have to remove some parts of the script, the team agreed, we originally were going to talk about every topic on the list associated with extreme programming, but we decided it was best to remove the last one, in order to shorten the presentation.

Ivan, Vivian and I were finding it difficult to grasp the concept of the user story mapping, but were quickly filled in by Maria.

After the script was shortened and the voice-over redone, Socrates was handed over the file and begun implementing it to the presentation, which was the final part.

Currently the video is complete, the Heartbeat retrospectives have been done at the end of every sprint, all three storyboards(one for each sprint) as well as all three scripts are read for demonstration, the Project Charter is good, the Stand-up meetings have been done Every time we have been together, and it is all being documented.

We now have 1 week to finish our user story map and make sure it is well presentable on the blog with all tasks for each sprint done.

Bellow are some pictures of today’s meeting.

Stand-up meeting/Product Update

This week and next are the final two weeks for the project, the team is close to finishing , the video however needs a few changes and so it is currently our main goal , the sprint and the storyboard are a good standard and are ready for demonstration not to say they cant be improved , which is something we are always on the look out for.

Today the team met with my exception(Vitor), as I was informed a stand-up meeting was performed and each chose a story from the user story board to get working on. Vivian and Ivan started to improve our story board, making it more presentable for the final hand-in and Socrates, begun working on the final scene of the presentation and adding the final bits.

Client Presentation/Heartbeat Retrospective meeting

Our Second sprint finished today quite successfully if the team may say so. We had a quick stand-up meeting prior to the client demonstration, I mentioned that each member should add a bit about what they had done during client meeting, as it felt like only one member was speaking last time and this could have potential bad results on our grades. The team agreed and each member decided to speak about their own piece of work that they had produced.

We collected the required documents and had a quick look at the video, Sokrates again mentioned that with Powtoon you can only add 1 piece of voice over, and that was the reason the last 2 minutes of the presentation had no sound, I quickly decided to go and record the entire script in one voice over as the client was still getting ready, once I was done, Socrates quickly implemented it to our video, hoping that it would match the animation, some parts didn’t and so we added/removed pieces to the presentation.

Luckily we were able to do this before the meeting and it turned out great.

Several things were discussed with the client, as in:

– The extra parts that need to be input to conclude the presentation

– The first scene text needs to be replaced with an image

– Text needs to be input above the roles so viewers can relate to the two titles

– The video needs to match the voice over better

The group chatted to the customer about the whole Agile process and our thoughts. We of course agreed it is very effective and it is working very well, nothing feels like a chore, and the team have a good relationship.

After the meeting we proceeded to do our Sprintly retrospective meeting.

First starting with congratulating the team on the job well done and the co-operation.

Then the questions:

What went well?

– Good animation

– Script gives good description

– Project charter was redone to good standard

– All members were present

– Stand-up meetings were always in place and on time

– Good communication between team members

– Most of product owner requests from last sprint were implemented

– All products were finished and ready for demonstration on time

– Blogging was done for every meeting

What went badly?

– Voice over addition was late

– First scene was not changed even though mentioned by client

– One blog post was not done well

What could be improved?

– Voice over needs to match the information better

– First scene text needs to be removed

– Pair programming scene needs name of two users above the character

– Storyboard needs to be improved to look presentable

– Voice over needs to be redone, at a faster pace

– Presentation needs to be taken back down to 3 minutes

With these points we concluded out retrospective meeting, added our new user stories to the storyboard and begun the final sprint.

    

Stand-up meeting 03.03.2015

Today me, Ivan, and Socrates met for our regular stand-up meeting, Vivian is on holiday so was not able to attend, we begun the meeting by talking about the end of the second sprint approaching and which stories still needed looking at. The team as a whole is quite well prepared and not much else needed to be done which is a nice sigh of relief,  Socrates showed us the work he had done on the presentation, and asked for our opinion on the animation for which Ivan, decided should be a bit different and gave Socrates his ideas, showing us the work he had completed prior to the meeting also.

 

 

I(Vitor) showed the team the storyboard for which I had redone which followed the product owners specifications, with much less text and a lot more drawings. We decide that for this sprint finishing :

– Unit Testing

-Integration Testing

-Code review

Was of top priority, and is what we worked on after the meeting, I changed the script to add more information about each topic and this meant that the voice over had to be redone  , this is the last aspect we as a group need to do before the presentation to the client on Thursday. I took it upon myself to do this as I was the one who changed the script. And Socrates accepted this and asked me to inform him when the when it is up on the group folder so he can implement it to our presentation.

Excluding this, all other parts are ready to go for the presentation, the team is confident, and agile is working.

 

Stand-up meeting/Progress update

Today was the first stand-up meeting we had done since the new sprint had begun.

Vivian explained to the team what she had done in regards to the script, the areas she changed, and asked the team what their opinion was, and said she was struggling to keep to the 500 word limit whilst still talking about all of the topics the team would like to address.

Ivan mentioned that he had thought of some new ideas to implement into the video so that we could express the points with more images rather than text.

And Vitor showed his new version of the storyboard to the team, explaining that he was having difficulties in deciding on the amount of frames, as the previous storyboard he had created for sprint one had too many, and so made this version much shorter.

Socrates had travelled to Greece, but did mention that to the team on the previous week.

After this meeting the team looked together at the user story board and started to dig away at the user stories, Vivian and Vitor decided to do the voice over and get that story complete for this sprint and Ivan improved the Project charter, making it more informative whilst at the same time simplistic, improving the teams chance of maximum marks.

Once both stories were complete, they were marked as complete on our user story board and other stories associated with them were moved up, which bought us to the next part, adding the new voice over to our presentation, and finding images to replace the text.

Client Demonstration / Heartbeat Retrospective meeting

Our client presentation took place today, quickly before we begun, the team had a stand-up meeting, we collected together our products and each member explained what he had done in regards to showing a product in the demonstration, we changed some of the video, by placing moving characters rather than ones that stand still, the storyboard had been slightly redone, and the script was printed according to a good format.

 

Our client then came over, and we explained the process of what we had done to follow the agile process, talking about the user story mapping, the project charter, and all the stand-up meetings that took place , how we approached the meeting and so on, we told the client how we split up the roles and showed the finished products, including the video, the script and the storyboard.

Much of the feedback was noted, and the team are aware of what needs to be done in the next sprint in order to address the improvements explained by the client.

After the client demonstration was finished, we proceeded to do our heartbeat retrospective to prepare ourselves for the next sprint.

We addressed the points of:

1. What went well

– Stand-up meetings went well, Powtoon is a great software to use, the team assigned themselves all the tasks that were in place and contributed a large amount to the first sprint

– Everyone understood the documents created, and used them throughout the sprint to keep focused on the main goals.

– All members are participating and have done extensive research on the topic the presentation is on and on agile methods

– The blogging is being done to a good extent and has all the created documents within it.

2. What didn’t go well

– User- story mapping was not used

3. What Needs to be improved

– Voice-over needs to be slower, louder and clearer. To be recorded in a quiet room

– Less text needs to be within the video, just the main keywords

– The team needs to think of different ways to represent information, making it easier for users to remember

– Storyboard needs to be shorter, the topics need to be less in depth in order to fit all into the time-frame

– Names of speakers needs to be implemented onto script

– Script needs more information on the topics

– Animation for each scene needs to be thought of

———-> Update and USE the User-story board more <——–

After these points were addressed we then went onto update the user story board with the new user stories, and changed the order of importance to match the necessities of the new sprint.

      

 

 

Progress update

Today was our second meeting, we first begun with a quick 15 minute stand-up meeting, all members had completed a task which they volunteered to do, and so the project is moving forward with good pace, Vitor showed the group the storyboard he had drawn up, Vivian had completed the script and uploaded it to the groups good drive folder on Sunday, and Socrates had begun work on the presentation, and Ivan had done some drawings to be input in the storyboard, everyone clearly expressed what they were having problems with, for example Socrates didn’t know which animation to use, Vivian wasn’t sure what extra information should be input in the script, and Vitor had no idea how long each scene should be or how many scenes he should have drawn.

 

We thought together about what needed to be done by the time the first iteration had finished, and so split up the tasks once again, Vivian created the script and so decide to do the voice over alongside Vitor, Vitor begun work on the project charter.

From the charter we broke down the important factors and created a user story board, from which we went into in-depth detail of what needed to be achieved in order to deliver all the pieces in the set time frame, taking into account the resources needed.

Socrates carried on work on the presentation, following the information on the storyboard, but mentioned one problem to the members, that you could only input 1 piece of recording into the application we were using.

Ivan had looked at the storyboard and said he would implement the drawings he had produced into the storyboard, and started doing so straight away.

 

Currently, all members are working towards something, and it looks like all artefacts will be completed by the time we must present them to the product owner Thursday.

           

First Stand-Up meeting

Today we as a team had our first stand-up meeting, making sure to follow the agile guidelines, we kept it short 15-20 minutes, chatting to one another about how were doing, what were doing, if any problems have come up, etc… Socrates then volunteered to start working on the presentation, but said that the problem he faced was that there is no script or storyboard to work from,  Vivian stated that she would gladly do the script , and so I chose to do the storyboard. Following the guidelines made it quite pleasant, it wasn’t like a team meeting that involved things such as “ok what have we done, what do we need to do”, instead we just took on the roles and understood our responsibilities.

We plan to hold our next stand-up meeting this coming Tuesday.

Will keep you posted.

Bellow are some pictures of our Stand-up meeting.

–       

 

Creation of Artefacts

Today was the first day of the project, as a team we created a project charter, which showed clearly a summary of the project’s key success factors, taking into account all the actors involved in the project, the business processes that we needed to follow, and the links/relationships of one another.

For our first stand – up meeting as team,  we first spoke about the most important rule of the project, which was to find a way in which we could all collaborate and document what was happening at each stage of our journey, and so Vitor decided that it was best to create a folder on Google drive for the team to drop important documents in, such as photos of the meetings, information on the topic, on video editing etc… which would make the agile process run more smoothly.

We began with creating a blog, obviously as you can see, since you are reading this, the team shared emails with one another and made all the members administrators of the website. We then created a folder on Google drive and agreed that each meeting one member would take it upon themselves to document on what was happening, by taking photos and writing on the blog, this time Socrates would be the photographer, once done all the photos he took were placed within the Google drive folder for all members to access and use as necessary.

Bellow are some pictures of the process.

 

We then proceeded to creating the project charter. It took the team as a whole a while to decide on how we should draw the charter, first Vitor had some ideas he had drawn up the night before, but they were too complicated and did make it easy for someone else to have a look at and understand what needed to be done.

 

and so we tried breaking it down into a what we thought was a simpler version, or should I say versions, as we tried again and again.

As you can probably tell, Ivan is the best at drawing in our team, hence us trusting him to do all the drawings. 😉

Until finally we decided on a final one, which involved only 4 important factors, the documentation, the video, the script and the presentation. So we got onto drawing it!

  

Once we had finished our meeting and completed the project charter, we decided as a group that we should appoint a specific time to have our stand-up meeting every week, outside of class time to talk about what we had done, and what the next step of the project is. Thursday’s at 10:30am seemed to suit all members best, and so it was settled, tomorrow being Thursday will be our second team meeting.

The team had a look at the subtopics on what the presentation would be about, and each member chose what he was most keen on researching in regards to extreme programming, this was interesting as no member said we MUST research, but instead one chose a topic, another chose another topic and so on, it worked out quite well with no implications.

The last thing we spoke about quickly was the presentation software we might use, Vitor presented the research he had done to the group, on a website called powtoons, where you use set animations to express your ideas in a presentational manner, jumping from scene to scene.

The team seemed to respond well to using this, but more will be discussed in the coming meetings.

The next step is to create a user story board and break down the essentials to achieve each main task in the project, more will be reported on the next meeting.