Its time to sprint. 3..2..1.. GO!!

Maybe one important thing that was missing from the past two blogs is: the method we are using to develop the project. Before the project even started, our mentor, Eric Schabell, had asked us to start writing a project plan. Having absolutely NO idea of what to write, we just sat down together and start making our "waterfall" planning. I couldn't even believe that we actually managed to plan the project, without having one clue of what it is in detail. All we knew was that we had to develop an application for a monitor containing project information and that the project has to be done within 100 working days. We had NO idea what tools we're gonna use, framework, etc. So we were (atleast I was) quite happy that we got it done, hoping that our mentor would feel the same way too.--- The first day I came in, our very first task was: RE-WRITE THE PROJECT PLAN!
During our studies, we had been introduced to the Agile Software Development, which is a method of developing applications using several iterations. On the first day, Eric gave us a book of Agile development using "Scrum". Scrum is an Agile process or framework for managing Agile projects. The method consists of: gathering requirements, producing a product backlog, daily scrum meeting - iteration(sprint plan meeting - determining sprint backlog - sprint - release - evaluation).
Anyways, we have spent our first week to gather all the requirements from some of the target users (3 technical project leaders, a developer, a test coordinator, and a senior project leader).
And today... oh first.. this has just been in my head the whole day so I really need to get it out of my system... DAMN!!(pardon my French) what a bad day today! The day before, Eric had told us specifically to come in to the office at 09.00, and I quote: "make sure you are not late tomorrow!" because we were going to attend our first monthly team meeting (with the whole 40something people in the department). Even though we normally do come in at 09.00, but I responsibly went to bed a bit early than usual, just to MAKE SURE that I get enough sleep and not be sleepy in the big meeting. Long story short: I woke up at 08.00, rushed my ass off to the train station and broke the bike on the way, dashed my way to the platform and BAM!: Vertraging (Delay). So I got in to the meeting 30 minutes late, ashamed.... I mean, OF ALL THE OTHER DAYS, why today??!
Back to the project.. So we've done all the interviews, and we have a long list of wishes from the users of what they'd like to see on the monitor. So we had our first "Sprint plan meeting" with the "Scrum master", Mr. Schabell, and we parted the sprint into 2 weeks (we have in average 4 weeks per iteration), and took just one out of the list to be our first information to put in our monitoring application: code coverage. Since we already had 2 options of tools that we are going to use(Pentaho, and Flex), so we made our "sprint backlog" categorized by those two things. Our sprint backlog pretty much consists of: Installation & configuration (for each of the two tools), and development (database connection, data extraction, transformation, etc.). The plan is to divide task between the two of us so that each of us can experiment with both tools and deliver some sort of 2 tiny demos showing the code coverage. And by the end of the two weeks we shall see which one is better and more feasible to go on with. If we could perform well, then we can extend the sprint backlog for more functionalities at the end of the first sprint (after 4 weeks).
So off we go... as soon as we get the proper rights to download stuff at work, we are going to start our very first sprint....... 3..2..1.. GO!!

Business Intelligence ?!

Today, we did some research for the tool selection. We got 4 options: JBOSS Portal, Adobe Flex, Pentaho, and MarvelIT. The last two mentioned are Business Intelligence (BI) dashboard. We have divided the task, ikram will do research about JBOSS portal and Flex, while I'll do the two BI dashboard.

Those options look very nice... we are very curious of what we can do with those tools and which one is the most suitable one. well, we hope we don't make bad decision about this :p
Anyway... I wasn't expecting this project could be done using BI principles or interface. this project is really getting more and more interesting for us, as we both are interested in the BI.

Just got a small talk with ikram and we think we can combine the Pentaho portlet in the JBOSS portal. As the Pentaho portlets use the JSR 168 standard that is compatible with JBOSS server.
okayy... got to go!

Graduation Internship: PRIMA project

Currently, I am doing the graduation project at SNS Bank in Den Bosch. This is a duo-internship project with my fellow, Ikram.

The project is to make a kind of "application" for project monitoring, the äpp"will be shown in a large flat screen hanging on the wall of the IT dept office. Passing by employee can get a quick look of what projects are running, project issues, project coverage, and maybe some fun things like the happy rating of the whole IT team.

I started this assignment last week... but just got the internet working few hours ago. today, we got interview with one of the TPL, Tom Opthal... he gave some input of the info he would like to see on the screen...

ikram got some info about the flex... and I did some research on JBOSS portal. it seems those two can be good options for us .. we'll see...