Auxano Sprint 6 Review & Retrospective

Week 8 of boot camp came to a successful end today as we wrapped up Auxano sprint 6. The boot camp team went out to eat at Liberty Burger and sat at the same table we ate at on the very first day of boot camp two months ago. It doesn’t seem like it’s been that long!

We’ve had a great time so far, and are all looking forward to big changes in the next few weeks. One big change was actually announced to us today: our training is being extended for a few weeks while sales continues to find new projects for us to work on. We will continue work on Auxano, as well as (hopefully) make some client site visits with some other Improvers to get a feel for the different environments we’ll be in outside of Improving’s Addison office. We’ll also hopefully have some more chances to learn from other Improvers while we prep for our (still) impending board reviews.

Below is an outline of what we talked about in our sprint review today, followed by some great feedback from the stakeholders in attendance (Sr. UX Consultants Kevin Baker and Vaughn Jackson).

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Auxano Sprint 6 Review Outline:

Intro (Walton)

• Sprint Goal
• Review Stories from scrum board
  • Engagements
    • Persistence, Test coverage, Views
  • Time Activities
    • Persistence, Test coverage, Views
  • Polishing

Passport (Ryan)

• View
  • Minor formatting changes

Engagements (Ryan/Dave)

• Create
  • If you leave the name blank, it auto fills the name with the name of the client you selected
  • Can’t create an engagement with the same name as another active engagement
  • Can’t create an engagement with a name that contains more than 45 characters
• Update
  • Can change whatever you want and it will update the engagement with the same id in the database
• Delete
  • Engagements do not actually get deleted, they just get tagged as hidden when you hit the delete button so that the time activities that rely on an engagement id do not break
  • When you delete an engagement, you can then create a new engagement with the same name as any deleted engagement
• Persistence
  • Demonstrate persistence between app starts
• Testing
  • Show tests

Time Entry (Jon/Kevin/Sam/Walton)

• Create
• Update
• Delete
• View
• Persistence

Calendar (Dave)

• Classes are now actually working

Badges (Kevin/Ryan)

• Views
  • Index view now has a bit of formatting, and each badge has an icon that we haven’t yet tied to a badge in the database, but it is potentially shippable in its current state
• Persistence
  • Time Killer, 8-Bit, and N00b are persisting

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Review Feedback, Notes, & Ideas

Advice For A Consultant:

“Come up with great ideas and put them on the backlog. Talk with the client about them, even if it’s not in the scope of the current project, and then sell the ideas to the client. Don’t be afraid of coming up with good ideas, even if you don’t know how to make them happen. You are part of Improving, and you can make use of Improving’s resources to make those ideas happen.”

– Kevin Baker, Sr. UX Consultant

UX Suggestions:

• Chosen – jQuery plugin that gives you a search to find the client you’re searching for (works for any dropdown)
• Start a project with UX – then set the views and functionality up to support that
• Think of less tech-savvy people when making UX decisions… What was the user trying to do? How do you get the user back to what they were trying to do without roadblocks?

Engagements:

• Create new engagement – reroute back to time entry
• Reset to small column for the engagement view
• Need a delete confirmation on the time activities and engagements before actually deleting.
• Delete buttons could be a different color (red maybe)
• Check the client ID and client name in engagements. Editing an engagement to use a different client after you’ve been using an engagement for multiple time activities could cause a problem with engagements as they are designed now. Editing time activities to just take information from engagements and not be tied to them in the database might solve this potential issue.
• Relabel Engagements to “My Engagements” in several places
• “Copy” Engagement functionality – duplicate an engagement and allow them to set a new name for the engagement and change values.
• Need a property that displays the first date you’ve entered time with an engagement, and the last time you’ve entered time with an engagement so you can see for record keeping and Pro-File use.
• Concatenate the project name or engagement name into the description when you send a time activity to quickbooks so that a client’s accounting department knows how to bill a project.

Time Entry:

• Quickbooks auto populates a time activity’s description with information from the company’s policy for personal loss and holidays – need some clarification on this
• Time Entry view needs a list of days in the week at the top of the view, that will show what weekday today’s “date” is
• Add Engagements / Manage Engagements options inside of the dropdown list for Engagements in the time entry view – “option groups” to group links inside of the dropdown – add javascript to listen for a change in the dropdown selection. onchange == add, then reset the drop down list to zero so if you hit back in your browser it won’t redirect again.
• Move save button to the left of the reset/delete button in Time Entry
• Time activities need to add up total hours for a day and display that somewhere
• Need to display more information for time activities in the “today’s time activities” list.
• Time Killer one-time view should reroute back to the proper day with the model that was submitted.
• Add a notification to the top of Time Entry letting a user know what activity they are editing, and whether or not they actually just successfully edited it
• Entering time in increments of 15 minutes as well as hours??
• Auto populate time entries for holidays and paid holidays

Calendar:

• Rename Monthly to “Calendar View”
• Tally and display hours reported for this month at the top of the calendar view.
• Add a “today” button to the top of the calendar view.

Badges:

• Badges Index View
• Add a category for Available Badges down at the bottom that would
  • Sort pending badges based on progress
  • Sort Earned based on??

Guiding Principles:

• Guiding Principles view – add navigation to let people know that there are multiple pages
• Carousel  slider- comes with foundation. Use that for guiding principles.

Misc Ideas:

• Leaderboards for the game and/or Enterprise – Points, EIP, & Badges
• View for PTO? Taken / Planned

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Boot Camp Week 8 / Auxano Sprint 6 Retrospective

 

+	∆
Planning “Planning Poker” More granular tasks Committed to goals we could actually accomplish Actually had a potentially shippable product to review Good feedback in review Stakeholder driven review Block Category on Scrum Board Had time to make things better this week Fixing broken tests	Sleep Potentially committed to too little Added a lot of tasks mid-sprint to make up for undercommitting Involve the whole team when there is a major conflict ^ OR seek mediation/arbitration from a mentor or P.O. Better communication

This week was a successful week! I hope you have/had a wonderful weekend. Thanks for checking out our review!

– The Project Auxano / Boot Camp Team @ Improving Enterprises, Inc.

Bonus! I didn’t see David O’Hara snap this picture from behind me, but I thought I’d share it in case any of the other boot campers missed it a few weeks ago. – pic.twitter.com/rs246SCsny

Picture by: David O’Hara

Pictured Above: Ryan Turek | Sam Marsh | Jonathan Livesay | David Ford | Walton Leavell | Kevin Berry | Jef Newsom | Allison Pollard | Cherie Silas