BC Day 12 – Auxano Sprint 1

So, I didn’t realize people were actually reading this. Hello people! Sorry my titles are so boring. If you want a more entertaining read, you might check out the other blogs, haha.

Daily Scrum: Yesterday Kevin and I wrote some tests and made them pass. Today… Kevin and I are writing tests and making them pass. No blocks.

Last night at the town hall meeting the boot camp team was recognized as being some of the newest hires at the Dallas office, and project Auxano was mentioned (not by name, but yaay anyway). The importance of the project was made apparent (at least to our team) throughout the meeting by the issues that were raised. I now have a greater sense of responsibility and ownership of this project given Its potential to improve time reporting and Employee Involvement Program here. I think the team also picked up a few ideas for features and things to focus on given the issues voiced, so the meeting was extra productive and informative for us.

Later today…

So let’s talk about the achievement system in Auxano. I wouldn’t call myself an expert on achievement/badge systems and employee involvement / incentive programs, but I do have thousands of hours of experience interacting with achievement systems as a user in learning programs and video games over the past decade. I’m concerned with some of the conditions of our early achievement/badge concepts, and I’m trying to make suggestions that will guide the team in the direction I believe is best. In spite of my (self proclaimed) experience and my strong feelings about the issue, I may not really have a choice but to work to the specifications given by our product owner. eh, what can I do but make my suggestions. *shrug* Anyway..

Jeff did 30 minutes of pair coding with each of us today, and I was up first due to beating everyone else in Rock, Paper, Scissors (*bows*). I found this very helpful and engaging, and hope we can get that kind of coaching more frequently. I think he was able to gauge some of the challenges each of us are facing so that he can point us towards self-learning resources and also introduce the group to new concepts or whatever else he needs to do to steer us on the right path. We’ll be shifting gears from pure C# into the ASP.NET MVC later this week I believe, so clearing up issues we have now is important before we move forward.

After lunch, I was playing a game of ping pong with Jonathan and Sam, and I spotted Curtis Hite (CEO Improving Enterprises, Inc.) walking down the hallway to the break room. I immediately facilitated a ping pong show match between Walton and Curtis, and we quickly engaged 10+ spectators around the break room. Walton and Curtis kept the spread tight (no more than 3 points apart) until tying it up at 19/19. Curtis came back and picked up the last two points over Walton on Walton’s serves to win 21/19. We’ve been waiting for this game to happen since the first day of boot camp, so that pretty much made my day.

I’m staying for the DFW Scrum User Group tonight (not just for the pizza, I promise), and then going to bed as soon as possible. Speaker at the user group tonight was Simon Cockayne (Blog | Twitter | LinkedIn)

That’s all, folks.

myBrain.LogOut();

-R