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.

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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.