Sprint 5 — The Last Blog!
All good things must come to an end…
Russ volunteered to be Scrum Master for our last 2-day sprint, and I volunteered to be Blogger. I should clarify that “Blogger” is not an official role under Scrum methodology, it’s a role that our team invented in order to document our learning…
So, what happened in our last sprint?
We kicked off the morning with a really strong stand-up meeting, which our Scrum Master had prepped on the previous evening. He had gone through the bother of splitting out tickets and thinking through the current user journeys for our app. Hence, we were all greeted with a delightfully clear diagram on a whiteboard, as shown in the picture below:
We kicked off our stand-up meeting with the usual check-in, this time “Which book/film describes how you feel this morning”…
· Hanna — Brave New World (book — both in the optimistic sense, and the dystopian sense)
· Farnaz — Eat Pray Love (Farnaz’s favourite film ever)
· Kriss — Quiet (best book ever for introverts) and Good Will Hunting (best film ever)
· Russ — Catcher in the Rye (strange book choice, I forget the reason why, maybe Russ is trying to shoot John Lennon) or Atlas Shrugged (book about people who get sh*t done)
We quickly realised during the stand-up meeting that we had more tickets then we could possibly handle, given we had only 1.5 days left, and that time would also be interrupted by various other very important things like the CV workshop and 121s with coaches.
Hence, we prioritised ruthlessly — Farnaz and Kriss picked up the big ticket on implementing a Friends feature (which we were all super excited about) whilst Hanna and Russ picked up a ticket about users posting on their own wall vs. other users’ walls vs. the “big wall” that shows everyone’s posts. We were feeling so optimistic that we even discussed what other tickets we could pick up from the “bit ’n’ bobs” section once we finished our allocated tickets…
Oh, how cute.
With hindsight — it’s great to have optimism and ambition, but actually both our tickets turned out to be rather demanding. Farnaz and Kriss had an early break-through, but then hit a minor hitch that took up a lot of time. Meanwhile, Hanna and Russ got off to a decent start, then had a brain wave about how to do the job “properly”, decided that would be impossible given time constraints, then proceeded to hack their way through to something acceptable.
Earlier in the day, some hesitation had emerged on the topic of “what, we have to do a presentation tomorrow?…”. But we decided to shelve that concern for now, just focus on getting stuff done between now and Friday mid-day, and then figure out the presentation on Friday at 2–3pm. This was the only rational option, seeing as we would only receive instructions about the presentation on Friday morning, so no point worrying about tomorrow’s problem.
As I write this text, it is now Thursday 9pm, and I know you’re all dying to hear how it went on Friday… Did the final version of the app work? Was it awesome? Did the presentation blow everybody’s minds?
Sadly, you will never know. This morning we decided that the duties of “team blogger” end tonight, so there will be no further blogs.
If you really want to know how the story ended, you’ll just have to offer one of us a job as a software developer and then we promise to tell you the end… Find us on linkedin/twitter/elsewhere.
It’s been wonderful! Yours truly,
Farnaz
Hanna
Kriss
Russell
