Spitchell
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Week 39

I'm sitting here trying to think of a way to describe the week that isn't completely work-focused.

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Work

Part one

Last week the new sprint started with kind of a cold opening. We'd identified a problem - users weren't able to tell they were on the corporate (as opposed to the consumer) site. Changes to the content hadn't been enough to solve it, so the PO said we needed to do some development work... and that was it! The team was told to go for it.

And that was cool - pretty agile right?

So the kick-off meeting was run by a designer and we all just kinda brainstormed options. Given the constraints we were under - we need people to understand they're on the corporate site; working above the fold; no backend devs; a two week sprint - the outcome was kind of inevitable: update the hero banner to be more legible and make it say something like "YOU ARE ON THE CORPORATE SITE".

Fine, nice and straightforward. But then the designer starts talking about user-testing multiple designs and I was like "Whoah, let me just clarify: this is a design sprint? We're not intending to actually implement anything?" and the designer agreed.

OK, so having made my contributions to the design process, I start working on some backlog tickets I've been progressing, thinking I can get them over the line and released in this sprint. All good, right? I like the way this is working, a kind of hybrid scrumban process... it's cool.

Part two

It wasn't until Tuesday morning when we had a morning scrum with everyone that it transpired the PO did intend us to

  1. design multiple options
  2. user test them
  3. select a design
  4. implement it
  5. test it
  6. release it

...all in the current sprint. Which is cool and agile, but vey ambitious considering how we've done things in the past. So I was a bit taken aback, but the user-tests were already underway and we had a good idea what we were likely to be doing. So I dropped everything and got on the case.

This was probably the high point of the week. I was figuring out how to get a component shell working via a CMS mechanism I'd never used before, making good progress, and deferring the details of the UI until the design was decided. Good times.

Part three

Long story short, it was tougher than I thought to implement the chosen design due to some of the layout expectations and the way the site is currently built. I had to pivot into CSS grid once I understood the problem and it's been so long since I used that. It got me down TBH.

When I struggle with backend stuff, or backend-of-the-frontend even, I console myself with the idea that my area of expertise is frontend-of-the-frontend. Well here I was, and it was driving me crazy.

It was just the despair phase, which I should be better at recognising by now. I persisted and got through it and demo'd it successfully to the rest of the team. The CSS was a nightmare so I got to work refactoring it and made decent progress (I'm not quite finished).

Conclusion

I'll have more to say about this sprint when it winds up next week and we do all the proper scrum stuff, like sprint review and retro and whatnot.

Leisure

END

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