AuctionTale

In testing, the main challenge is to manually keep track of data accuracy given the extensive and complex scope of the system. User Acceptance Testing being simultaneous and in the same environment as QA testing also posed a challenge due to some differences in issue priorities.

Development has multiple challenges:

• The project was developed by multiple developers leading to varying code ownership and challenge in integration
• Lack of code reviewing in the FE
• Business requirements were not final leading to changes over and over again
• Following and polishing a previous developer’s work
• Unmaintained automated tests

Managing the Project also imposed various challenges namely;

• Lack of properly signed-off Business Requirements Document that will serve as a single source of truth for the development of the whole system
• Majority of the developers were part-timers thus, having difficulty in finding a common time for everyone to sync and a challenge in getting a sense of ownership from the majority of the part-timers.
• Managing the client since the client doesn’t have the idea of MVP. The mindset that the client has was to have a perfect system despite it being too complex for the agreed budget and timeline
• Client also has various additional requests in the middle of the project, so team is divided into 2 – one team is focused on addressing the client concerns, another team is focussed on continuing the development as discussed on our planning

Solution

For Developers:

• Frequent alignment and code pairing sessions between developers if it is gonna be developed by various devs
• There should be a full-time senior responsible reviewing the complexity of development
• Thorough alignment with client about the requirements

To better manage the team, PM imposed various management styles to cope with the challenges faced:

• Agreed to have twice a week meeting with client – one for demo of progress, another one for testing of features in Staging environment
• Agreed with the team to have a StanUp during lunch time so that part-timers can attend. And another stand-up at night so that developers can sync amongst themselves.
• Conducted multiple planning sessions and discussed the requirements given by the client – developers also estimated their work hours at this point.
• Got the help from the QA team to establish the BRD for the project.

Build

Application is designed as API-Driven architecture with Single-Page application for smooth user experience with Websockets for real-time data update running on an AWS platform.