Individual Assignment Unit 1

Presented by: Eliana Lopez

To: Professor Joe Malak

Write 1000-1500 words about the context of your current (or past) work. Focus on the software
delivery practices followed and the methodologies used to deliver software projects. Speak to
how work is delivered, ordered/prioritized/ teams are formed and how solutions (code and
architecture) are designed.

I am working as a consultant for International Market Expansion Projects in Explaryence, a

Colombian company. Basically, I am giving support and I am an adviser to the International Market
Expansion Project in the US. I am working there, in the development and implementation of a
portfolio of services for start-ups. Mainly it will provide support and help to non-technical founders
to develop and create software platforms, focusing on high quality, and limiting time and cost. In
the way to help and support start-ups, I started to connect with start-ups that required software
development for their products.

Also, I started to support another Colombian company that does maintenance of web platforms
in Europe. Where, the information, features, requirements that are collected with the customer,
are grouped into sprints. The software used during projects is Jira. It organizes each Sprint as a
board, and each board has 4 columns (is possible to configure more): to do, doing, tests and
publish. In the beginning, each task is placed on a card and put in the column: to do. When the
Sprint begins, all tasks and deadlines are visible to each developer.

Delivery practices

The first step in our company is always to contact the customer and have a high level of insight
into what software (product) is required or/and needed to be developed. Sometimes is required
only some modifications or updates in the platform in order to maintain it according to the
guidelines of the company. This first step requires an interview in which we expect to determine
which is the main objective, which parts of the application will be affected or will be integrated
into the platform and finally define a small diagram which outlines the tasks of the developers.

After the meeting between the client and our team in the country of origin (Europe), we proceed
to have a meeting between the team in Europe and the team in Colombia. In this step, we present
the client's dimensions and the proposed diagram, which is now translated into tasks that will be
part of the sprint. Then the list of activities, the dates of local tests, dates of tests doing by the
client and dates of publication are established.

Finally in a third step is to establish the developer or developers responsible for executing the list
in the sprint.

After this step, begins the sprint (on the date selected) with the development of each of the tasks.
In each task, the developer reports the comments that the client should know, I review those
comments and communicate them to Europe where finally the customer comments whether or
not agree with the developer's comment. Then having in account the feedback of the customer,
at the end the developer reports that the task was completed.

At the moment of the integration, the application is passed to the test server, where the client
starts an application parallel to the production server and performs the respective tests.

When the approval is received by the client, on the date of delivery, the application is published
on the production server and a publication report is delivered.

Priority of work

A task is a priority as long as one of three follow conditions is present:

1. When the request is due to an error in the application:
Action:
In this type of cases, we proceed immediately to collect information from the error, download the
database and update the test room to try to recreate the error.
Once the error has been recreated, the ticket is created in the active dashboard and sprint. The
ticket is resolved in parallel with the assigned tasks and it is published after being tested and
approved by the client.
2. In cases where the task has lasted a very long time without being finished:
When a task is proposed and the developer does not finish it in the first sprint, a couple of more
sprint passes and this feature has not been integrated begins to scale in priority to such a point
that it is a high priority.
This usually happens in tasks that the client considers simple but for the server is complex to
interpret and is raised the problem of representation. Between all the developers that are
available, the problem is faced and a solution is given.
3. When the request is a correction to a previously implemented module.
In this type of requests, the clients express that one or several users cannot see or modify the
information on the platform. Particularly these cases tend to be complex because the problem
may be in the data or be raised errors at the time of implementation.
There is used a procedure similar to case 1 in which the first step is to reproduce the error, the
second is create a card and finally solve it quickly and efficiently, distributing the load in the
developers available.

Code architecture:

The architecture of the code is divided into several parts:

1. Business Logic Layer (BLL).

In this layer rest all the methods through which the existing data in the database is accessed and
also through which new data is inserted.

2. Web methods of each program.

These methods are the intermediate layer between the DOM owned by the client and the business
layer, fulfills the task of establishing an orderly route through which information flows in both
directions.

3. Front end.
Here lies the code with which the views are created, this layer makes calls to web methods and
through them retrieves the information, orders and renders it on the DOM.
This architecture has proven to be successful, allows quick detection and correction of errors as
well as saves a lot of time when implementing new modules.