I’m back! The past week was a bit challenging if I am being honest. We started this new Phase in the Academy called “Building Something from Scratch”. And as the name says, we have to build new software from nothing to something.
In this essay, I will describe the experiences and learnings I have during this challenging week.
Getting Requirements
First thing first, in order to achieve something or create something, you need to know what is exactly you are going to do. For that to happen as a team we started having meetings with the clients and the staff lo learn more about the incoming project.
The first challenging part was getting the what, why, and how of this specific project. What is that we are going to be. Then why is this software need to be built? By making this, is someone's life going to get easier?
And obviously the how. How exactly do we plan to attack this kind of problem?
The first lesson, what re-learning a lot of Software Engineering processes. More specifically, what is a Software Requirements Specification document, and why do we need it.
First Steps
A lot of first also happen during this intensive week. For example, we as a team establish what kind of technologies we were going to use.
These decisions were hard, of course. Everyone wants to use their preferred technology, stack, etc. But we have to make comprises and have patience when dealing with these kinds of situations.
Finally, an important and crucial decision for this project to succeed (finger cross!) is deciding what kind of methodology are we going to use. My team decided to go agile, so the final call was to use Kanban.
Another thing that I re-learned is that technologies can be learned easily if you make your mind to it. But hard work and teamwork come with practice and an open mind.
Every small step is part of something bigger
I have come to the idea that not everything is going to be perfect. But in order to achieve greatness we need to start asking questions. Whether we are shy or not. If we don't a specific thing, the best to do is ask, ask, ask!
This whole month we are going to deal with a lot of stress, that is true. But that is not the point, the point is to work together and start believing we are here for something, and that something is learning.
I hope that in my final essay of the month I would come back here, and hopefully, everything went great and smoothly. With that agile mind, we learned in the first phase.
