Hi Everyone!
Thank you for reading my blog.
This post is related to the current sprint my Dev Team is working on, the Sprint 16. On this one, we went through one of our regular daily stand up meeting. This was the day 5th of the 2 week sprint. The team were able to provide their individual updates and we shared a few impediments and proceeded to a UI brainstorming.
First Daily standup with Proj4.me
Before on this sprint, we normally conduct our daily standup using a whiteboard I stick into our office wall. I drew a Kanban board on it with its 3 typical columns, To do, Work in Progress and Done. Honestly, I love the approach of this low tech high touch concept were each devs would manually pull out their assigned sticky notes when transferring it to the other columns while sharing its update during a daily stand-up meeting. I find the experience holistic and engaging.
Now, I decided to try out new things to our development to bring in new experience and ideas and that’s when I introduced the used of this Project Management Software, Proj4.me. Whilst there might be a plethora(which I already used before) of PMS including Asana, Monday.com, Trello, Notion and many else, I seem to find Proj4.me really fits in how I manage the overall development of this application specifically, the sprints. The one thing that I really like the most of it is its straightforward User Interface.
When all the team members are already available to conduct the Daily standup meeting, the first thing that I always do is to use an application to randomly select who is going to be the first to share their updates, the wheelofnames.com. It’s a fun and engaging way for us to kick off the meeting.
Sharing our updates
Unfortunately, I was the first one to be picked by the russian roulette game application we’re having fun using with, wheelofnames.com. Lol! So I shared few of my tasks and updates. I moved few of the done cards, the tasks I am allocated with, pertaining to UI tasks. I also mentioned to my team about schedule adherence and encouraging them to accomplished their tasks within the set deadline of the first user story we started working on. This user story has an estimated effort of a combined 83 hours or roughly 3.5 working days. The mentioned estimated effort was come up based on the decomposed technical tasks the team conducted during the sprint planning and each of the identified tasks has their corresponding estimated efforts required to be accomplished. By adding all those technical tasks under that user story, we identified its required estimated effort to a total of 83 hours. Fortunately, few of my dev team members were able to complete their tasks on this first user story they started working with.
What’s next?
Now, the dev team are working relentlessly and collaboratively. Unfortunately, we encountered a certain impediment. This blocker pertains to our disconnected internet connection in our office due to a fire incident happened nearby. On a regular working days, we are required to work on site and when that incident happened, we lost our internet connection and everyone was left to hold the development task because they need an internet access to use their development tools and thus, it really pushed back our development. However, I was able to approved a work from home setup with my dev team to the management and that is when we were able to slowly catch up with our sprint development while working from home, remotely.
Thank you for reading. I’ll be posting the next daily standup meeting for the Sprint 16 soon.
Cheers!