Digitally Immersed

Happy New Year, in this blog post I thought I’d give a brief roundup of the digital immersion course. The app itself hit setbacks towards the end of the project as a database proved tricky to integrate with our existing program, however we did manage to create a login system using the No-SQL Firebase by Google. It allows you to remotely set passwords and email addresses to be used to access the rest of the app through our login page. Amazon’s DynamoDB was also close to achieving the same result, with cosmetic changes required but difficult due to Amazon’s own UI integration. Below you can see a selection of screenshots of this login and the rest of the app.

Main menu

First step of entering personal details

Entering card details

Claiming back an assessment day expense

One of the tutorial links to other services

A FAQ page accessed through menu button

For a small team coming in to this project with no experience I think we all feel fairly pleased with what we’ve made. We received positive feedback about both the app and our working methodologies, with many of the problems encountered mirroring those of real world projects. Below you can see how we would continue if carrying on:

presentationscreen1 — Slide taken from our final presentation – link below.

As well as this, our opinions and thoughts on the course can be seen below:

presentationscreen2 — Slide again taken from the end of our presentation.

A full overview of the course can be seen in more detail through our full Digital Immersion Course Presentation.

On a personal level, I feel I now have a decent grasp on what agile means; working in sprints and with Kanban; and how to work independently as part of an IT project. Making use of each others individual skills as they developed throughout this project was a key part of how we learned to work more efficiently, and I feel more confident in approaching problems with unknown solutions now.

In terms of improvements, I think the course could have done with some more regular feedback throughout the weeks, possibly something to mimic customer interactions so that adaptations have to be made at points throughout the project. It’d also be interesting to hear the thoughts of someone with prior IT or agile experience as they would presumably find it less useful when joining from a digital background. Overall however, it felt as though it got us up to speed and was a good use of time.

Ps. Normal service to resume on the blog with updates every Wednesday!

Gitting Better at This

A fairly quiet week this time around, with progress continuing on the on-boarding app. The team struggled to combine our separate builds of various pages and sections at first, with it turning out more difficult to merge projects in android studio than first anticipated. We tried uploading to GitHub through DXC’s own service however we hit a brick wall of permissions and ended up using private accounts to share our files with each other. GitHub is definitely something I want to explore further despite our troubles with it on this project. In our latest sprint retrospective an interesting point came up that although combining projects had been a blocker and taken many combined hours to solve properly, now it’s a simple 5-minute job for us if we want to add a new page in. Alongside this, we have two new graduates who are being integrated in to the team who we’ll be able to teach these skills a lot more quickly than it took us to learn them by trial and error.

With our work merged the next big task is to implement a database to work alongside the app and store information such as names, passwords and addresses. Half the team have been researching this whilst we worked to format our different pages and make a more coherent product that’s also in line with DXC’s branding. Today I have been working to create a custom taskbar to be implemented across every page of the app; with company logo, page titles and a drop down menu for FAQs and settings included. Next week I’ll post screenshots of the finished (demo) product which might give a better overview of our work, thanks for reading!

Hackerman

Thursday and Friday of last week our scrum team took a break to help with a hackathon being run in the DTC for students from Newcastle, Northumbria and Sunderland Universities. It was good fun to be a part of an active event like that and see how differently teams worked and came up with their own solutions. The brief was fairly open, to begin development on an app that could help autistic users through the use of wearable tech and Amazon Echoes. There were some really smart students, with excellent technical skills that put our ropey Java understanding to shame. We were able to judge and award marks on how well the teams were working however, looking for agile techniques and good communication. Ultimately the best teams were those that fully understood the depths of the brief and really considered all options and factors surrounding the problem, not just the pure technical development.

We’ve continued our sprint this week on our own app and I’ve found the progress made with functionality a surprise. I was naturally leaning towards wanting to do more work on design and usability where I felt my current strengths would lie, however I keep end up trying to implement small new features to the banking pages of our onboarding app that I am responsible for and getting sucked in to these technical challenges. After a lot of YouTubing and StackOverflow posts it’s good to finally get a small feature working (such as a drop-down menu or connected activity) and I’ve been able to help others in the team quickly work them in to their pages as well, agile at its best! The next few days are looking like they’ll be a challenging rush to connect all our bits of work and I’ll report back in a weeks’ time how the finished demo looks.

Digital Immersion Heaters

I’ve spent my past week beginning a digital immersion course: a month of training with the other Newcastle graduates designed to flesh out all of DXC’s favourite buzzwords. It began with understanding how a scrum team operates, and the in-person training delivered by certified scrum master Will McLean was really helpful in getting a solid understanding of the process and its benefits. We all agreed that we came away from the first few days with a much better understanding of scrums than the online tutorials had given us. Next up was learning about Kanban and its use in projects to influence productivity. This included an interactive “board game” that exemplified how hard it was to keep track of so many simultaneously moving factors, but ultimately lead to a better understanding of what we could control to boost profits on a second run through of the game.

We are now working as a small 4-man dev team in a scrum simulation with the goal of producing an onboarding app for new DXC graduates like ourselves. Whilst coming up with clear plans of action quite well, sprint progress has been slow at times due to our unfamiliarity with the software used (first Visual Studio before switching to Android Studio). However, it’s rewarding when the YouTube tutorials and fixing of code pays off to create a small result. We’ll see how the app is coming along in a week!