Skip to main content

Brainstorming camp

My team just started  building a new project about finance. There are something new with us rather than other processes happened before. Here is we didn't have requirements/user stories about the project yet and we needed to work together with another team in this time. Our product manager (PM) decided to have a camp to collect the ideas in order to getting started as well as make the communication between the teams.

Firstly, our PM gave an introduction about the project to all members. Then, we decided to split and focus on four topics that we needed to discuss about them. They are:
- General information: working agreements between two teams included coding convention.
- Data model: structure of data.
- GUI design: user interface and user experience (UX).
- GUI technical framework: how data model and GUI can be worked together.

The target of each topics should be given an overview and can be shown why and how to work with chosen approach. Finally, we separated all members from our 2 teams to 4 smaller teams corresponding to above topics.

We had a whole week just for brainstorming and collecting ideas. The camp mainly involved three parts and these parts can be repeated and changed. They are 'World Café', 'Workshop'
 and 'Review'. Generally, we got inputs from all members in World Café and then we had to do something in Workshop and we got outputs in Review.

World Café is a bit new method for me. Actually, we have no coffee/cafe in this section but maybe yes in somewhere. Each team had a host. The host of his/her topic collected ideas from other members, discussed about it and took notes on a board by a mind map. After 20 minutes, the members except the host moved to other topics and the process before was repeated but new ideas and discussing was continuously contributed. So that all ideas from members from 4 teams was collected actively.

In Workshop, the members of each teams did something deeply about their topic such as researching the possible approaches, making document and creating a small demonstration.

In Review, each teams gave presentation about what they had done and answered some questions from others.

After a whole week of the camp, I saw the relationships between two teams was improved a lot and we all have an overview about the project. Even I was not sure that all topics was understood deeply or was followed to correct approach, but it was getting better and we can move to our next steps.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

My must-have apps for daily work

There is no doubt that cool apps can help us be more productive and enjoyable at work. For the time being, I really love the following apps which are used by me almost every day. 1. A personal Kanban In fact, a personal kanban is the most useful app for me. Why does it matter? It is not just a to-do list, but it keeps me motivated every day because it helps me be able to know what my "big picture" is. I usually set up my plans together with a path to reach them.  KanbanFlow  is my preferred tool. KanbanFlow 2. A terminal Needless to say, a terminal is a must-have app for every developer, especially the ones use macOS/Linux. Due to its importance, I love to decorate and enhance it to be super exciting with various tools such as  iTerm ,  oh-my- zsh , and  thefuck . ;) iTerm + oh-my-zsh 3. A documentation "ecosystem" As a developer, I can not remember all things that I have experimented a day. Moreover, a document is really useful for sharing an...

Monday vhandit #1

This is the first post in a series of articles called "Monday vhandit". You can go to the original post by clicking on each head title. Character encodings: essential concepts This article points out why Unicode matters and differentiates among concepts: character sets, coded character set (unit is code points), and character encoding. Explained from First Principles: the Internet The very structural and well-explained article contains almost concepts of the Internet. I really appreciated the author's effort put on that post. Dev Community - DevDojo I just joined this community. DevDojo is really a developer-oriented platform. It is very nice, easy, fast, and sufficient to write (Markdown supported) and search for a post. The best of it, you also have a personal blog for your posts at "<your_username>.devdojo.com". My username is vnnvanhuong Everything you need to know about HTTP security headers A good collection of HTTP security-related headers. Moreover...

Selenium - Override javascript functions to ignore downloading process

I have got an issue with downloading process on IE 8. This browser blocks my automatic-download functionality on my app so that I could not work with my test case any more after that. In my case, I didn't care about the file is downloaded or not, I just focus on the result after downloading process finished successfully. Therefore, I found a solution to ignore this process so that I can work normally. I use Primefaces, here is the remote command to trigger the download process <p:remoteCommand name="cmdGenerateDocument" actionListener="#{logic.onGenerateDocument}" update="xrflDocumentCreationPanel" oncomplete="clickDownloadButton();"/> The following is my test case: @Test public void shouldUpdateStep6ToWarningIfStep1IsValidAfterFinished(){ MainPage mainPage = new MainPage(); waitForLoading(mainPage.getDriver()); EmployeeDetailPage empDetailPage = new EmployeeDetailPage(); waitForLoading(empDetailPage.getDriver()); e...

My 2017 Review

Passion for System Design After finishing a one year project, my longest stable team (lasted for 3 years) was separated into two smaller teams. Sadly, but that was a good chance for me to become a key member in my new team. My preferred skills were about system architectures; therefore most of the tasks of building the application structures were handled by me. In order to enhance my design system skills, I have spent much my time for reading books closely after work. These following books help me a lot. - Object-Oriented Thought Process | Matt Weisfeld - Head First Design Pattern  | Elisabeth Freeman and Kathy Sierra - Java 8 in Action: Lambdas, Streams, and Functional-style Programming | Alan Mycroft and Mario Fusco Junior Technical Architect I was requested to join a technical architect team (aka Team. Alpha) where I actually had gained experiences almost on interviewing candidates for my company (lol). Besides, I noticed myself must improve the skills of convinci...