1. day! Introductions and workstation set-up.

Introductions

The bootcampers with Helmes staff

On the first day at the Helmes Bootcamp we met the two teams in the bootcamp and the bootcamp team, who will help us on this exciting journey. We had a introductory meeting and saw and met all the people  who will be directly interacting with us. The mood was light and everyone was friendly. We also got an overview of the core values of Helmes with the uplifting slogan of "We want to be the best software services firm in the world.". True enough, the inquisitive mind of the bootcampers wanted to know, how being the best is measured and the answer is by employee happiness, client happiness and efficiency.

The aim of the bootcamp will be to offer an intensive software development training, see what Scrum is in practice and to complete a full software development process. The evaluation criteria for the bootcamp is surprising compared to the aim with 30% of the evaluation coming from the result of team work. Helmes really seems to value interoffice relations. Achieving business goals will determine final evaluation by 25%, following Scrum principles 20% and code quality and successful sprints attribute 15% and 10% respectively. So coding proficiency is not the most important aspect by a long shot.

The teams and projects

This year there were 2 teams taking part in bootcamp: a Java team and a .Net team.
Projects for this year were Licences allocation and Applications Accesses and Contract Register. The Licences allocation and Applications Accesses focused on managing licences that are distributed within Helmes and aimed to help managers free up unused licences. This project was assigned to the Java team. Contract Register aimed to add a new module to an existing application, that would help Team Leaders manage contracts. A clever person would assume this was the assignment for the .Net team and they would be right!

The setup

After the introduction of the projects it was time to set up the workstations and attempt to get our first commits to the development repository. After installing all the prerequisite software the .Net team ran into a problem with connecting to the development database and we were unable to verify that the base application worked. Java team did not have this problem and they were off to the races, learning about git commands that they had not used before. While the Helmes staff debugged the problem with the connection we got some tips from our mentors and I personally learned, that more often than not, if you don't build logging into your application as you build it, you will never add it afterwards.

That was it for day 1!