Moody Adventure — An experimental project management workflow
Who we are and what we do?
Let’s Do It PL is a community where application development industry professionals relay their valuable experiences to fresh starters by developing real life applications. The community consists of volunteer people who are both eager to learn and teach. We believe learning never stops and application development does never ends.
Today, we are going to talk about how things perform behind the scenes in Lets Do It PL community.
The main recipe
The world has changed. It never stops. Once useful strategies became obsolete in today’s interconnected and intercommunicated world. Old way of planning demanding projects are now not suitable for this kind of world. New way of development gone in the direction of more robust and flexible alternatives.
Like many other successful companies we did not try to reinvent the wheel and chose to implement SCRUM project management system with Agile Manifesto backing it up. It was successful to a certain degree but a real life company and a community is, in the end, different.
So what challenges we faced and how we overcame them?
Challenges and solutions
Voluntary
For some volunteers of the community the projects we developed were not their main focus but rather something like they did in their free times. This was probably the biggest challenge especially for starting our development duration. We overcame this situation by simply increasing the duration of our sprints. Normally a sprint in SCRUM lifecycle lasts 2–3 weeks but our sprints were at least a month long to ensure task were done and completed.
Voluntary also means with no money. Usage of many practical libraries and services are actually not feasible in these kind of projects. So we had to focus mainly on Open Source projects which were easy to access and had reputable community behind it. Shoutout to many Open Source projects for coming to our rescue.
CI/CD
CI/CD nowadays are main center of attraction and for a good reason, they are helpful. They reduce the chance of OS related errors and they offer a very swift workflow integration. Github Actions was our first choice because it was versatile and we had to publish to more than one cloud services.
Testing, development and production platforms should exists to have a complete quality ensuring workflow. Maybe even with personal platforms for every induvial. We solved this issues by using different cloud providers like AWS and Azure as they offer free tier which can used for testing purposes.
Motivation
From time to time motivation dropped and productivity reached bottom lines. It was normal as how it happened with every person on the planet. Burnouts are real. Sometimes it is okay to take a break and that is just what we did. Let people relax for some time address any daily life issues they have before going on with the projects. In the end every team consists of people.
The Gap of Experience
Another challenge we faced was lack of experience and knowledge in our younger members which we overcame by leading them to complete tutorials and tracking their progress. Also, for some amount of time we added experience exchange sessions to our daily standups where a topic was covered every day.
Going Live
Maybe the biggest regret of our Moody project which was it is inability to go live at the end of every sprint. This could bring us many benefits but sadly we were unable to follow this goal.
What is the secret element we found most successful?
All in all there were many beneficial sides of SCRUM management like sprints, separated tasks, backlog, retrospective meeting etc. But the most successful one for us were the daily stand-ups.
Sometimes, as mentioned above, motivations dropped. Sometimes small mistakes that could cost you many days occurred. Sometimes misunderstandings happened. Sometimes life got ahead of you. All of them could solved by daily stand-ups if your teammates are open enough. If they ask you what they didn’t understand or even just told you how he/she planning to do his/her task.
Conclusion
There are some widely acknowledged and used strategies for a reason. They are successful and success was what we found in SCRUM methodologies. We dare not to say we could implement 100% but in the end every case is different.
