Highlights from ProsperIT Consulting work
SUMMARY
My team worked on improvements of the existing Bewander project; a MVC Entity Framework Bootstrap travel website. I participated in daily stand-ups and for the most part, everyone did the work remotely.
I loved working in agile and the TFS system. So many light bulbs went off on how everything fits together - it was a blast to learn. I've since embraced Trello - it's free for any size team ... but do miss the way the scrum board works in TFS.
My stories were in UX/UI, Google Maps API, and I picked up some QA from errors I found while going through the existing code base. I used HTML/CSS/JS and C# via Visual Studio and Parallels on my Macbook for a seamless PC/MAC integration. In two sprints I worked on about 14 user stories, covering Controllers, Razor syntax.
August 2018: When I went to set up a link to the working website my browser had all kinds of "do not go here - security risk" warnings. And to see the complete website requires creating a user account anyway ...
Alternatively, I've chosen to just highlight the user stories and code that I worked on.
OVERVIEW
The project had been progressing on and off by (mostly) interns for a bout a year. The first day was spent going through the code base and trying to make sense of how it fit together. Without any consistency in teams over the time period - there were multiple styles, approaches, and dependencies.
"Simple" fixes to padding and margins turned into rabbit holes of conflicting and overriding code.
One of the first stories was fixing a footer that covered content on some pages - but not others. So I picked up that user story, and in fixing that and some faulty overloads/parameters ... I discovered the links on some footers went to the wrong pages. Used Razor syntax and got all that squared away.
I worked on location pop-ups, and the Google Map API integration.
Throughout this project there were a lot of new terms and procedures to learn. Instead of the school scenario, this was a real world figure it out yourself ... with lots of deep dives.
On the deep dive topic, there was another seemingly straight-forward user story I worked on to place a scroll down chevron on the home page. Simple enough, right? Bootstrap's Font Awesome includes them! About that ...
I freely admit that coming out of an intensive segment in C# and ASP.NET my jQuery had become a little rusty - so I quickly put together four or five stand alone bootstrap sites utilitzing a couple different approaches with the intended code before even trying it on the actual project. Those sites all looked great! None of them worked on Bewander. (Eventually I found a work-around!)
At first I struggled to manage scope - I wanted to clean out code - fix all the little inconsistencies I saw - but quickly realized the importance of reporting what I saw and sticking to the scope of the story I was assigned.
I've since come to appreciate Lean and MVP as a process and how that relates to scope. It's scary how easy an hour flies by when you're coding. You can get really bogged down in details before you know it. New mantra: stick to scope. (You mean that div tag I cleaned out had a purpose somewhere else??) You have to love TFS and changesets!
By the end of the two sprints the difference in my understanding, skill and contribution was significant. I could easily find my way around the code and knew how all the pieces fit together. The whole Agile/Scrum CI/CD system clicked in my brain ... I come from a very traditional Waterfall process - and I wish I'd known about all the implications sooner.
DETAILS
If you want to see the weeds - all the stories are outlined on an excel doc here