Hi and thank you for reading this blog post.
Today, I’m excited to share our experience during the Sprint 16 review.
The day has finally arrived for our Dev Team to showcase the new increments developed in Sprint 16. It has been an exciting two-week sprint, filled with challenges and setbacks due to some impediments. Despite these obstacles, we successfully completed all our sprint backlog items just in time!
What is Sprint Review you may ask?
According to the latest scrum guide, Sprint review is to inspect the outcome of the Sprint and determine future adaptations. The Scrum Team presents the results of their work to key stakeholders and progress toward the Product Goal is discussed.
The Sprint Review provides key benefits by fostering transparency, encouraging early and continuous feedback, and ensuring alignment with the product vision. It enhances communication between the Scrum Team and stakeholders, allowing for real-time adjustments to the Product Backlog and development plans. This regular engagement helps build trust and ensures the product evolves to meet user needs and market demands. Overall, the Sprint Review drives incremental improvement, maintains focus on delivering value, and supports the adaptability essential in dynamic environments. With that said, I invited our stakeholders last July 3, 2024 via google meet and present to them the recent development we completed.
The Stakeholders
I invited our team members from other parts of our organization who will likely to use the software we are currently developing with. They were also the people we gather the requirements we conducted in our requirements gathering process in our planning stage. These people are sales team who is going to purchase the products, purchasing team who represents the suppliers and lastly, our logistics personnel who will represent the logistics users.
The invited sales team were Vyazze Avenido and Raquel Balansag. While on the purchasing team were Klynea Serafin and John Sorio. Lastly for the logistic representative, our logistics operation, Ariel Loquinario. All of them operates our sister company’s Supply Chain operations.
Introduction
I always start off the meeting with an agenda. In this way, it helps me to manage the attendees expectation of the meeting. For this sprint review, I walked them through the agenda slides where I highlight items on what they will expect on this meeting.
Quick Recap for Previous Sprints
One of the highlight in the introduction part of this meeting was to have a quick recap on what did we share about our last sprint reviews. This setups the stage on assessing their knowledge and experience of the features we released on the previous sprints. Also a nice warm up to have them engage in the call.
Highlighting the New Features
We then dive straight to what are the new features our Dev Team have been working on. These are Logistics Integration, System Notification, Booking Feature, Accreditation Feature, Admin Integration. The feature details are as follows:
Logistic Integration
A logistic service provider is a critical component of the supply chan industry. They are responsible for carrying the commodity from one place to another. In an actual operation, Buyers of commodity reach out to these people to tap into their service by requesting them to deliver the commodity to the buyer’s desired deliver location. In terms of how we translate this user requirements to this software project, we added a new user type of the platform we call the Logistics users. By doing so, this enables the platform to onboard logistics providers soon and have them provide their services to the online buyers we have in the system. With that said, this sprint 16 plays one of our development milestone by successfully integrating the logistics account by developing its own terminal and integrate it to the whole system. This critical component now enables the buyers to book their service should the buyer want to request a delivery shipment method of their order.
System Notification
One of the successful features we introduced by far is the system notification which, unfortunately, we failed to include on the version 1 of the platform. These notifications now enables the users to be fully updated on their transaction which spans from booking confirmation, payment verification, order status updates and many more.
Booking Feature
With this new feature, it enables our Buyer users to secure the prices of their desired commodity to purchase by booking their order straight to the suppliers and logistics user. This feature works like how Uber, Grab and Food panda booking feature works. The system would fire off booking request to the suppliers and logistics who, based on the buyer’s commodity request, can serve the buyer’s order.
Accreditation Module
This module enables our platform to link the logistics providers to the suppliers. In a real world supply chain operations, logistics providers of a petroleum commodity needs to be accredited to the suppliers before they can get inside the premise of the supplier’s depot. This is standard established in the industry to ensure safety and awareness while operating in the supply chain. The dev team were able to translate this user requirements in the platform by enabling the logistics user able to submit their accreditation through the platform.
Admin Integration
One of the critical user in the platform is our Admin user. They are responsible for facilitating a smooth transaction of the users. They also have admin tools that enables them to have visibility of orders, transactions, user database and analytics. This sprint marks the successful integration of this user type by enabling our admin to have visibility of the active orders and the uploaded deposit slip of the buyer.
Increment Inspection and Feature Testing
Finally, the exciting part of this meeting is when we share together the experience of using the new feature of the platform.
Buyer Simulation
To successfully structure this part of the session, I simulated one order transaction by accessing my Buyer account and submitted an order request. Altogether we did this exercise together with our sales team who represents as the buyer. We go through the process of completing to fill up the order form, selecting the delivery date and submitting it into the system.
Seller Simulation
I then requested our purchasing team, who represents as the supplier, to login to their supplier account and publish their offer. By doing so, this enables their account to receive live order request into the system. To do that, we added our product first and then place the prices of those added products and published them into the system.
Logistic Simulation
We already have the Buyer submitted the order and Suppliers published their prices. What’s missing now is to let the logistic user to publish their logistic rate and have it add up to the buyer’s quotation page so that the buyer could then Book the order. By doing so, me together with our logistic representative, logged in to our logistic accounts and utilize its unique and cool features.
We first added the vehicle that will carry the goods or commodities and submitted an accreditation request to the supplier to establish the connection. Once the supplier approved our request, we added our logistic rate to the newly added vehicle. To publish the rate, we uploaded a CSV file containing a list of all the municipalities in Cebu, with each municipality having its respective rate per liter. By successfully completing this process, we were able to publish our rate and participate in the live quotation feature native to the platform, which is initiated by the buyer when they submit an order.
Booking Confirmation Simulation
Now that all the required vendor and service providers are already connected to the buyer’s submitted quotation request, we let our buyer representative, Vyazze, to click on the booking confirmation from her buyer’s portal. This booking confirmation is only clickable when there’s a supplier and logistic providers connected to the buyer’s submitted quotation in the buyer’s portal.
After Vyazze, clicked on the Confirm Booking button, the platform then sends off a booking confirmation to one of our supplier representative, Ma’am Klynea, which happened to be the cheapest amongst the suppliers who were included in the quotation. She then received a pop-up modal notification in her screen prompting her to confirm the buyer’s booking request confirmation. Upon a thorough review of the order details, she then clicked on the confirm booking button, confirming her availability to serve the buyer’s order. By doing so, the platform then sends another booking confirmation modal to the logistic provider included in the live quotation, which on that simulation, it was me who happened to be cheapest amongst the participating logistic. I then received a pop-up modal notification in my logistic’s portal prompting me to confirm the order. I confirmed it by clicking on the confirm button. The buyer’s order was successfully booked by the providers, both supplier and logistics, which is now proceeding into the next stage, the payment and processing section.
Admin Simulation
During this exercise, I was assigned to represent the admin. I logged into my admin portal and accessed several new features rolled out in this sprint. My admin account successfully viewed live quotation requests through the Quotation menu, an increment based on the user story from sprint planning: “As an admin, I want to view quotations in the platform.” I also tested another new feature that allows the admin to view orders in Payment Status, corresponding to the user story: “As an admin, I want to view deposit slips submitted by the buyers.” Unfortunately, we encountered a bug that prevented me from viewing Vyazze’s submitted order, which was already in the payment status. The development team thoroughly investigated the bug and decided to address it in the next sprint.
Wrapping up the Sprint Review Session
Overall, the sprint review was successful. At the outset, we introduced the new features that the stakeholders would be experiencing. We then proceeded to inspect the increments, allowing each invited stakeholder to interact with the features and provide valuable insights and feedback. Although we encountered some bugs during the inspection, we anticipated these issues since we were simulating orders in our development environment. Identifying these bugs early is crucial to ensuring they are addressed before the official rollout. My development team, the stakeholders, and I concluded the review with new insights and a shared understanding of the progress and areas for improvement.
In conclusion
Sprint 16 was a milestone in our development journey, marked by the successful integration of critical features such as Logistic Integration, System Notifications, Booking Features, Accreditation Modules, and Admin Integration. These enhancements significantly improved our platform’s functionality and user experience. Engaging stakeholders from various parts of the organization provided us with comprehensive feedback and insights, ensuring that our platform aligns with real-world requirements. The practical simulations for buyers, sellers, and logistics users allowed stakeholders to experience the improvements firsthand and offer valuable feedback. Although we encountered some bugs, particularly in the admin’s ability to view payment statuses, identifying and addressing these issues during the sprint review was crucial for refining our platform before the official rollout. The feedback and insights gained will guide our future development efforts as we focus on resolving identified bugs and continuously enhancing the platform to meet user needs and market demands. Overall, the Sprint Review for Sprint 16 was a productive session that showcased our team’s hard work and dedication. We look forward to carrying this momentum into the next sprint, making continuous improvements, and delivering exceptional value to our users.
Thank you for reading this blog post! I will be providing our sprint retrospective session soon.
Best regards,
Marvin E. Navarro