Artistic Collaboration, Week 4

After several weeks of pitching and discussing possible projects, we finally were divided into teams this week and began forming the initial framework for our project.

Team Decisions

• The team decided we would work in the context of weekly sprints, since there is an expectation of a potentially deliverable application every week. 
• I checked with the team to see if there were any desired deviations from the original project pitch. The team decided to stick with my original vision, and I will be acting as the product owner for this course.
• We have committed to updating Slack Wednesdays and Fridays. We will also be using Google Hangouts for our Monday night meetings.
• We will be working with the Microsoft stack, developing with Azure, ASP.net, SQL server.
• We will be using BitBucket as our version control system.

Looking Back

Over the past week, I accomplished the following items:

• Initiated Slack channel for team collaboration
• Initiated project on pivotaltracker.com to maintain team backlog
• Identified MVP with three primary use-cases (to be developed in this order):
• As an artist, I can create a profile in the system.
• As an organizer, I can create an event with specified participant maximums.
• As a collaborator, I can (view and) respond to events with open slots.
• Populated backlog with epics for setup and use cases (profile, event, rsvp)
• Began populating backlog with user stories for setup and profile epics - this will be an ongoing task
• Began working on a mock UI - did not complete

Challenges

I did not face many challenges in week 4 other than a lack of time spent on the project. I took this into consideration, and have begun clearing items off my calendar and replacing them with dedicated project time.

Looking Ahead

Over the upcoming week, I plan to accomplish the following items:

• Flesh out the big vision of the application
• Complete a mock UI that covers the first 3 use-cases
• Draft ERD for the project
• Set up a Google Drive folder to share documents
• Review Slack channel discussion and summarize findings - upload to shared drive
• Continue adding stories to backlog

Metrics

With this week involving mostly set-up and vision, there isn't much to measure that would have a lot of continuity in future sprints. I think the following would be appropriate ways to measure the sprint:

• Accomplished: 1 story valued at 0 points
• Stories added to the backlog: 7