Agile development and Scrum
The day started with creating vision for the UI based on the information gathered in the client meeting yesterday. Armed with our notes we started hashing our the fields and views to our best ability.
With a baseline design done we were joined by our helpful clients and analysis team, who helped us phrase high level business requirements. In order to do this we had to define a series of points, that would end up helping us form an elevator statement and business goals and their metrics.
 |
| The task was not easy |
First off we determined who would benefit the most from our application and they would be our
client. Secondly we identified the
need, for which they needed to use our application. Then we had to have a great
product name for our creation and classed it into a
product category. A big aspect was the list the
key benefits, that our solution would provide. And to finish off we described what would be
unlike the current process e.g. make the process less time consuming and create less errors.
 |
| Discussion is key |
 |
| Don't forget to document your decisions |
 |
| Make sure the whole team is on the same page |
Afternoon began with a seminar about agile development and Scrum. It was a free-form lecture conducted by Raul Annus, the head of development in Helmes. We started of the lecture with the question why agile development is needed and what makes software development so difficult. In the end we managed to word in our own words a few points :
- Environment changes fast
- Very many dependencies
- Software is only a representation, not the real thing itself
- Software disrupts the business process
In conclusion we ended at the realisation, that
there is never a perfect analysis of the problem and that making something faultless is limited by us being human and making mistakes. In agile you have to make a small usable product and actually test it within the business process as a whole. But in order to build something useful you still need to align the strategic business goals and the business needs, only the features have the luxury of not being right 100% of the time.
After a small break we had a meeting with our stakeholders and intruduced our UI to them. Showing a mock-up of the UI got the team leads creative juices flowing and we got a good idea of what the UI would look like in a perfect world.
