Day 1

Schedule:

10am — 11.30am: Project Brief and team formation
12.30pm — 3pm: Project planning
3pm — 4pm: Individual research on rails
4pm — 5pm: Project planning

Successes:

• Agreed an MVP, broke each feature of the MVP into user stories, defined the ‘definition of done’ for each and estimated each item (using T-Shirt scale — small, medium and large complexity).

• Agreed on our learning objectives for the project:
• Created Trello board and agreed upon usage and workflow.
• Set up our project together (i.e. forked repo, added people to the repository, went through the current codebase to understand what it does and how its structured).
• Challenged each-other on technical, procedural and creative matters.

Breakthroughs:

• I feel that being so clear on our MVP meant we could go into our first sprint planning knowing exactly what work needed to be assigned.

Struggles/blockages:

• A lot of our MVP required registration & sign up to be completed. Having not used Rails before we weren’t sure how long this would take which made it difficult to estimate.

Learnings:

• Agreeing on a ‘definition of done’ for our planning session (i.e. what will we need to have agreed before we can consider our planning done) before starting meant we covered all the important topics.
• Setting a time limit on planning topics would probably have been useful.