“More blessed, less stressed…” 😇

Hello again! 👋

We are very happy to have you back here. This week was very interesting, 

hope you enjoy reading. 📖

 

On Thursday, we had a talk about how the ISO / IEC 29110 standard was applied in the systems development department of the UAZ. This talk helped us to understand the importance of documenting our development process, and the advantages of being certified under a standard. It is important to emphasize that the objective of a certification should not only be to obtain a paper to be recognized, the important thing is that in reality the activities of the process are carried out in the correct way and quality products are developed, it would be of no use to be certificate, but do things without an order or following a process. Among the advantages mentioned to us about attaching our process to a standard, it mainly has to do with order; in addition, there is more control over the projects that are being carried out; you know what your status is and you can even know the activities in which a team member is participating. When you do your work in this way, implicitly external agents turn to see and recognize your work, sometimes without the need to be certified. Finally, something that was very clear to us is the importance of documentation; as the teacher has mentioned several times, the software is a matter of people, in this way, we know that any member of the team is prone to suffer a disease or even leave the project for some reason, that is why the documentation becomes very important; if we get used to having our process well documented, we will not depend on a single person, something that would be very harmful if someone from the work team were missing.

On Friday, we started working on the pendings we had. The day before we were working on the inspections of the design document and we started presenting the inspections performed to our quality leader. While Mario was reviewing the inspections carried out, Raúl and Paola were checking some problems they encountered when installing the framework with which we will be working for the project. Brenda and Jorge were completing the registry of corrections and uploading pending documents to the repository. After Mario finished reviewing and concentrating the inspections, he distributed to each of us the corrections we had to make. We realized that even after we review our work there are still errors and although we know that it is very difficult to find all the errors in the personal reviews, we are sure that we must be more careful when reviewing our work to reduce the number of errors they come to inspections.

After we finished making the corresponding corrections, Brenda uploaded the files to the repository and informed the teacher that we had our design document ready so that, at some free time she had, she could review us. A couple of minutes later, the teacher replied that we had some mistakes and we decided to go to her cubicle to comment on the mistakes in person. We honestly felt somewhat crestfallen, because we believed that our work already fulfilled what was necessary, but after the observations made by the teacher we realized that it was not so. We returned to the workplace with a little low spirits, because even when the teacher told us that we were doing well, we had several errors in our document, which makes us delay a bit according to the plan we established. Even so, we appreciate that we are told what we are doing wrong, because in this way we learn so that next time it does not happen again.

On Monday we planned the presentation of progress of our project, on Friday we were working on it, deciding what we were going to include and who would be chosen to move on to present. On this occasion, we chose Raúl. Before the presentation we were somewhat nervous about what was going to happen, because we expected everything we had done so far to be fine, but we know that there are some details that we could forget. We were the sixth team to present their progress; something we did not expect is that they asked us a lot, the teacher told us that she had identified that the reason that several classmates asked us, was the fact that we had not previously contemplated adding the mockups to the presentation, something that helps a lot to understand the how our application will work.

In general, we feel very good about the comments received, as this helps us to consider aspects that we might not have reviewed and thus improve our project. Something that was mentioned many times, is the fact that several teams are somewhat behind, some for documentation and others for external reasons; the teacher's recommendation was mainly to abide by the provisions of the definition of “done”, so that in this way we are more responsible for our work and we are not always needing someone external to evaluate it. Another important point that was discussed has to do with non-functional requirements; unfortunately, some teams had not taken these aspects into account, and that, moreover, should be considered from the first iteration. In particular, we had not considered the security requirement, considering that our application uses sensitive data, we know that it is essential to take it into account, so we decided to get to work on it.

After finishing the design specification document, the revisions and inspections of the same, we continue with the coupling with the framework that we will use for our development. We started following an online course in which we generated an example project, unfortunately it did not work at the first time, but after some queries on the internet, we managed to correct the problems we had and we were able to execute the project.

For a moment we feel very pressured to have several errors when generating the project, but in the end, to solve it we calm down a bit. We prepare the project in firebase, which we will use for our project. The rest of the day everyone focused on continuing with the examples of the course we were seeing. The pressure began to be felt because the teacher had commented a previous day, that on Friday we would present the results of the first sprint; unfortunately, we felt that we were not ready yet, because for different issues such as errors in the requirements and design documents we would have been delayed.

We started Wednesday's class with a review of the goals that each team had defined; this in order to check that each of the team members are working individually to achieve the proposed goals. Each team commented on the goals they had defined and the teacher indicated some suggestions that it would be good to contemplate regarding them, as some defined goals were not very well established or did not focus much on the project. We feel good not having many observations about our goals, only in a couple of them.

The teacher told us about the importance of defining quality goals, which should have a positive impact on the generated product. In the second part of the class, we were reviewing an activity in which we were able to write some aspects about the project, individually, this in order to express our feelings about the process and our work team and avoid that, if there is a problematic situation, a problem is not generated until the end, but gradually the problems are being removed and do not become a pressure cooker. We believe that these types of activities are very important, because, when developing software as a team, it is sometimes difficult for all of us to agree; In addition, as the professor had already mentioned, the software is a matter of people, and everything that people involved in the project bring, is passed to the software.

 

Finally, another reflection of the day was about the contribution made by each of the team members; sometimes it is not enough to just do the corresponding work, it is to go further and contribute to the entire project, be involved and willing to work. In our case, we believe that the entire team is committed to the project. Hoping not to be so repetitive, during the day the pressure of Friday's delivery continued to increase; we try to calm down by reflecting on what we have done our best, and that we will continue to do so, hoping that the results will be the best we can. In spite of everything, that day we were very happy with the news that our colleague Carlos Javier returns to the University, after several days of absence. We were very happy to know that he is already better.

On Thursday, we started the day coding, suddenly some errors came out as usual, but we were relieved that we were moving forward, maybe not at the pace we wanted, but the important thing was to continue. To lower the pressure a bit for all the work we have on this and other materials, we decided to buy pizzas; something that we feel very deserved for everything we have strived during the semester. After pizza and dessert, we continue to work, each one, at their own pace, but always trying to do their best. That day we stayed late working, hoping to move forward as much as possible for the delivery of advances on Friday.

“More smiling, less worrying. More compassion, less judgment. More blessed, less stressed. More love, less hate.”
― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

See you next week friends!
- Inventors