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.