Week 3 & 4

I was too busy to write anything here.

In the week3, customers were introduced, and we handed in the preferences of the projects. After the introduction, we practiced planning game with trump cards. It was very interesting. We estimated the time to finish tasks on the several sheets of paper. The tasks were about sorting the cards. After estimation, we chose one of the tasks and did that within the given time. We did this game twice, and in the name of common sense, the estimation of the second time is supposed to be more accurate, yet the first estimation was more accurate. I think it's because we had more experience of doing those tasks after did some of them, so we could finish earlier than what we expected. It was a learning curve effect indeed. However, in the second estimation, we just estimated without consideration of that improvement of our performance.

On the weekend, we got the customer allocation email from Andrew. I expected some web application development but the project we have is developing window application in Java environment. We actually have a little problem with that as none of us are familiar with Java Swing which is Java Window API. Thus, we tried to research about it and found some Swing books to read.


In the week4, we had the first customer meeting. Our customer is Alastair who is a very kind and nice man and also a software developer. We had misunderstanding about meeting day so had to change the meeting day twice. Despite this annoying situation he understood us and accepted those changes. After this experience, we made sure about the fixed meeting time which is agreed with all the members and the customer.

In the meeting, before we started to do planning game as we learnt, we talk with our customer to get very general information and overview of the project. After that, we explained about the planning game to our customer. As we already practiced planning game, it was not difficult to do it. We could easily do with giving some examples to our customer. Besides, he has some knowledge of XP, so it was also helpful to work with him. We helped him to decide the functions that the software shall have and to subdivide them.

After the planning game, we estimated the time to develop each task, then showed the cards with the estimated time to the client, and asked him to choose one of them which he wants to have first. We have 11 cards from him, and he first chose "Display all the message in a window". The estimated time for this function was 7 hours.