day -18: cleanup, commits & AgileZen
Daily stories from the ambadoo team, behind the scenes, dev-stats and other random stuff.
What an epiphany. Since we started working with ambadoo we’ve been working with some different management tools. The setup with one part in Sweden, the other in Spain it was necessary to find tools to collaborate over distance. We’ve used Beanstalk, Basecamp, Codebase but mostly fallen back to email. Among those, Codebase is easily the best one.
AgileZen
We’ve been missing a tool where we have an overview of the project, process and what’s going on. I believe we’ve found it. AgileZen is a digital version of the physical scrum board we’re using. It enables us to sit apart and work from anywhere, yet have total overview of the to-dos, workflows and progress. We just set it up, so we’ll see how it develop over time but it’s by far the best tool I’ve seen to date. Try it out if you work agile!
Commits & Cleanup
We continue to clean up in the backend, stripping it down to only the required resources, while writing stress tests so that when we launch it won’t break apart. Magnus is really crushing it there, making it hard to see him leave the project. He’s done a great job documenting not only the API but setting up the system so that others can take on the mission.
iPhone
The work continues on the profile. If we’d kept the profile to only stuff that’s in the built-in address book we could store it in that database without problem but since we’re adding things like privacy, tags and other things we have to create a separate storage for that, then keep those two in sync, as well as sync to the server. Syncing is more difficult than what it seems, but it has to be right. Your, and your friends information should be the same on all devices. That’s this week’s big challenge, and we’re on it.
day -29: it’s taking shape
daily stories from the ambadoo team, behind the scenes, dev-stats and other random stuff.
It’s been an amazing week. Very intense & awesome fun. For the first time in a very long while (nearly a year) things start to shape really well. From having the developers scattered around the world, to having no developers we’re now sitting everyone together in the same room, working vertically & tight. Vertical in this case means taking a User Story, a scenario basically that shall work across the system, back-end & iPhone App together.
We’ve started to work with sprints (scrum lingo), and this weeks sprint was split in two scenarios: meet & keep in touch & log in with Facebook Connect. Check on both! We’ve had a Facebook Login all the time but it was never built for production and at best a really good joke. Now there’s actual authentication through Facebook, which is a very liberating feeling.
The Scenario meet & keep in touch is pretty much the equivalent of exchanging business cards, like people did in the old way. It’s about quick and easy connect to each other, an everyday scenario when you meet new people. Now, instead of dealing with paper, it’s a one-click-operation. You might say but “what about bump”, and indeed it’s just that action (without the goofy move) but the exchange is not of static information but to information that’s always up-to-date.
mockup view.
We hope this will make life a little easier in all the scenarios when you meet new great people that you want to stay in touch with, without the hassle of manually typing in, and keeping track of peoples contact info.
You have no idea how great it feels that things are moving again. It’s been a bumpy ride but we’re on it, and we’ve gone from nearly not moving, to be moving fast, thanks to the great dev team from jayway.