Sprint planning meeting with Alan, Wayne, Eric, Bryan, Chuck, and I. Alan had setup a new Jira board to run the sprint through. This was a request from the guys. We were trying to use elements of time, but they guys wanted a more visual layout. Because time is of the essence, that is ok for now. Somewhat of a bitter/sweet thing for me. Eventually, we want to get all of our projects and project management pieces fully into adilas. That is my goal, at least.

Anyways, we started out and Alan pretty much ran the whole meeting. He was introducing the next sprint with an epic, issues underneath the epic, and then small notes and comments. He also gave a light demo of the what is the what in the enterprise part category project (current/next sprint). He was giving out assignments and talking with the guys. They got into some UML charts and graphics. UML stands for universal mock-up language. Kinda like a flowchart for data and objects. They were going over class diagrams, extensions, inheritances stuff, naming conventions, getters, setters, and trying to shorten things up.

They spent time going over plans for the object models, methods, public and private functions, etc. Some of the guys were requesting some training on the UML stuff and other topics. Open conversation and some of the guys were chiming in and asking questions and making suggestions. Felt pretty good.

One of the things that we are trying to do is - learning as we go and taking the time to inspect and adapt as needed.

Lots of new variables today. They added in Jira, UML, plus all of the agile and scrum stuff. It seemed like a lot at first, I think that it got better as we went along. Chuck volunteered to help with some code review. I was also happy to see the guys pulling from the past two sprints and learning from what we just did. That is awesome.

We spent some time assigning and talking about story points (estimations on time and complexity) for the user stories. As that progresses, we took a small detour and talked about where it (the enterprise part category project) is going in the near future (say the next sprint or some future sprint). We got deep into some image stuff and ended up telling the guys that we will push that off until the next sprint, so that we don't complicate this too much. Lots of talk about images, where to store them, current functionality, and future plans. This was one of our only major side tracks for this meeting. Pretty good.

Towards the end, Alan had the guys go in and play with the Jira board, move things around, make assignments, claim things, etc. Eric really wants us to focus on the standup meetings and keep them tighter (more on task or on target vs all over the place).

Once everybody else left the meeting, just Alan and I chatted about a few things. Light review and making some plans. We also talked about possibly switching between GoToMeeting (currently using this online meeting environment) to Zoom and paying for a pro license. Anyways, we did some comparing and make look into some options. Not to bash GoToMeeting, but it does cost more and doesn't have some of the same features. We started using GoToMeeting in 2013. No decisions have been made yet, but we'll see.