Blue skies reflected in a campus pond

Today marks the beginning of another two week technical sprint on the project. This follows the inaugural Steering Group held on Monday, which endorsed the team’s recommendation that we should  develop a new Programmes Factory from the ground up using PHP. A couple of days later we held a very succesful planning session with  our colleagues from EMS and took delivery of  Angela Watson’s excellent handiwork – the core list of data fields.

Mark Fendley, our scrum master  then prepared user story cards from what turned out to be a very useful planning meeting. The project  start period was always going to feel a bit slow with lots of talking and apparently not much happening – though this was a very necessary stage. It now feels that we are entering a much more ‘hands on’ phase.

By the end of this sprint we should have created the basic data model, though we expect to have to tweak it a little as the project progresses, and have created a ‘proof of concept’ user interface form. This will allow us to seed the database with test data and to perform some early load testing.

As mentioned before we want to deliver  the application incrementally to our customers and seek reviews and endorsements for each stage of development. Here’s hoping for a suceesful retrospective at the end of this sprint.