Goals
Christina took over as the Product Owner for this sprint. This was a planned change to share the leadership experience with another person. As Product Owner, she helped set the following goals for this sprint:
- Create a rental form for the costumes taken out of the theater
- Create a website hub for online links
- Create filters/views for rental dates longer than 3 months
Christina also went above and beyond by meeting separately with our client to catch her up on what she missed during the Sprint Review. Kudos to Christina!
This sprint was our last major development cycle. Sprint 4 would focus primarily on implementation. That meant it was crunch time.
Rental System
Perhaps the biggest undertaking during this sprint was designing a system to track costume rentals. Community Players Theater often rents out its costumes to other theaters. Our team wanted a way for these rentals to be tracked digitally. This provides the theater with costume popularity data and helps keep renters accountable.
Andrew and I took the lead on this story. Andrew created a Rental Database spreadsheet very similar to the Costume Database. This spreadsheet tracked the ID of the costume, a description of the costume, the renter’s information, and the date rented and returned.
I began writing the Google Apps Script for the forms that would be used to populate the Rental Database. We needed two forms: one to check out a new rental and one to return the rental.
Similar to code I wrote for the New Costume form, the New Rental form records the input into our Rental Database as a new row. The code automatically inserts some fields, such as the current date, to save the user time.
One of the challenges of writing this code was getting the form to also update the Costume Database. The script had to find the costume with the specified ID, then change it to show as rented out and insert the rented date. I ran into a few permissions errors here, but with a little effort and a lot of searches on Stack Overflow, I was able to figure it out.
With a little rental form coding experience under my belt, I was able to quickly create the Rental Return form. This form was much simpler. The user enters the ID of the costume that was returned, and the databases are updated to reflect the status.
Hub Website
Zachary and Tom began researching the possibility of creating a website that could house all the links to our tools in one unified place. This would make it easier for the user to access our tools, instead of operating across a dozen different pages.
As Product Owner in Sprint 2, I had done a little preliminary research on using Google Sites as a WYSIWYG website creator. I thought Google Sites might be useful since it already tied into Google Suite. I mentioned this to Zachary and Tom, and they took the idea and ran with it.
Zachary and Tom produced a sleek and functional masterpiece. This free website solution makes it quick and easy for our client to find everything she needs. Everyone was so impressed with their work, that the Props and Shop Team approached us asking if we could create something similar for them.
The website is available at https://sites.google.com/view/communityplayersinventory/costumes. *Warning: Parts of the site may display incorrectly due to user permissions. This is by design so internet scoundrels cannot destroy our precious databases.*
Red is Rad
Christina and Silvia worked in the Costume Database to code a formula that would make any costumes that have been rented out for over 3 months show in red. This was a feature requested directly by our client. She wanted a reminder to show which rentals might have run off.
Scrum Highlight – Daily Scrum
The Daily Scrum took place first thing every class period. The purpose of the Daily Scrum is for each team member to give quick a status update. The Scrum Guide time boxes the Daily Scrum to 15 minutes, so this isn’t an opportunity to tell your life story.
To keep things rolling, Andrew facilitated our Daily Scrum by passing around the talking ball. Whoever had the talking ball would answer three questions: what they did last meeting, what they would do today, and if there were any roadblocks stopping them. If another person had input, they would quickly mention they wanted to meet after the Daily Scrum ended. The Daily Scrums helped us keep each other accountable with our work and fostered collaboration within the team.
Sprint Review
When our client was a few minutes late, we all began to sweat. Not again! But never fear, she did come. Whew!
The Scrum Team went over our accomplishments for the sprint and had the opportunity to showcase all the work from the previous sprint as well. Our client was very pleased with the documentation, data entry forms, and the hub website. She only had minor suggestions, which we implemented early on in Sprint 4.
We then scheduled dates for implementation and training in the final sprint. We decided we would take the first half of the sprint to finalize our system and then meet with out client the second half of the sprint for training.
Sprint Retrospective
Andrew lead us in an exercise emphasizing the Agile values for our retrospective.
Each member of the Scrum Team rated our performance for each of the four values. As you can tell, we thought pretty highly of ourselves! A happy Scrum Team is a healthy Scrum Team, as my father always used to say…
At this point we had really hit our stride. In just 6 weeks, we had nearly accomplished all of our goals for the system. The only tasks left to do were to wrap it all up and transfer the ownership to our client.
Mitchell Milestone
As I mentioned above, I actually took a step back from this sprint and handed the Product Owner duties off to Christina. I thought she did a really great job! This new perspective took some weight off my shoulders and allowed me to focus more on development with the rental system.
Even when I was in the Product Owner role, I was admittedly still very hands-on with development. We learned in our Scrum Certification courses that having both Product Owner and dev duties can cause conflict, but in this case, we really couldn’t afford not to have all hands on development deck. Honestly, I like being a very involved leader. I have read of many leaders, such as Elon Musk and Bill Gates, taking the same approach. In fact, Elon says 80% of his time is spent engineering, and only 20% is spent doing what might be thought of as traditional leadership tasks. I see myself pursuing a similar work breakdown in my future career.
Despite being heavily involved, this project really gave me the chance to practice delegation. I have been very fortunate to have a fantastic team for this effort. While I have spent a lot of time begrudgingly micromanaging group members throughout my college experience, I finally felt that I could trust the folks on my team. Everyone on the team was very capable and produced quality work. In my future career, I now recognize that great employees are out there; you just have to find them. Once I do find them, I can provide them the vision and let them run with it. I have been amazed with what my ACC 362 team has produced!
ACC 362 Individual Project 