Tatag Aziz Prawiro,(Bi)Weekly Report, Sprint 1
Hello, guys! I believe this is my first time posting on behalf of myself in medium so I believe an introduction is in order. I am Tatag Aziz Prawiro, people call me Tatag. As per the requirements to pass the Software Development course in my major, I am going to regularly post a story around Software Development (I’d like to try to write in English), especially one that is related to the project that I currently develop. Currently, I am the hustler and also a hacker of the AdHub development team, called The A-Team. You can find the brief details of the project in another story, do read this post if you are interested.
There are several things I did during the pre-sprint and the sprint that’s currently ongoing, I will try to go over them as clearly as I possibly can.
Contributes to the understanding and finalizing the concept of the product, the AdHub, as a whole.
During the pre-sprint after the first meeting at Aula Gedung Baru, the team and the product owners arranged a meeting at Cafe Sekre, Fasilkom. During the meeting, the product owners gave us a more detailed explanation of what we are going to build. While the explanation was detailed, it was the case that the developers were not always on the same page. As the hustler in the team, I did my job to clarify what the product owners want and discussed it with the other developers until everyone was on the same page. Other than that, I brought an idea to the table, that is, my suggestion to change the product name “AdHub” to something in the Indonesian language and has a catchy feeling to it such as “Yuk, Iklan!”. The other developers also tried to come up with another Indonesian phrase that can change “AdHub”, however in the end because we need to act and start development fast, we still go with “AdHub” as the product name and the product owners approved it.
Relearn the Agile Software Development Methodology
To be honest, even though I already learned about Agile Methodology during the Software Engineering course and practiced it during my internship at the Pusilkom UI, I still could not fully grasp what is Agile actually. So, in order to deepen my understanding of the Agile concept, I tried to relearn Agile from the fundamentals. I read and tried to comprehend the manifesto and the 12 principles again. I conclude that Agile put a lot of emphasis on collaboration during the development process, and the working product as the main evaluator of the performance of the team, and so I believe the dynamics, the cohesiveness of the team is crucial in making a good agile team. Consequently, because the working product is the main evaluator of performance, we should not stick too strictly to the details of the methods that are used. What I mean is, I think it’s fine to tweak the details of a method in order to fit the needs of the team. An example of this is in the sprint planning phase, particularly during the PBI weighing phase. I learned that using poker planning could be dangerous to an inexperienced development team, so I think tweaking it so that we decide the weigh by discussing it with the other teammates is better.
Learn the workings of the Google AdWords API
As our product aims to be a “bridge” between UKM and internet marketing, one of the means to do so is for the product to be able to be a simplified platform of online ad posting. And to achieve that, our product will use the Google AdWords API. I learned a lot of things about how the Google AdWords API works but I’m just going to explain briefly in this story. I may write a specific story for it on a later date.
Basically, the Google AdWords API gives us developers a tool to become a “manager” of “ads accounts”. This functionality really fits the needs of our product. By creating a manager account, the manager account can create personal ads accounts under it, and it can be done using the API. The API also provides a way to manage and generate the ads created by the personal ads account. In order to use the API, a developer would need several credentials such as the Developer Token, Client ID, Client Secret, and so on. The API uses Oauth2 as it’s authorization mechanism.
Conclusion
Thank you for reading my report, or story. I hope what I shared today could be useful to you guys. I apologize for any language that does not seem appropriate, feel free to give me feedback in the comment section below. Thank you!
