Sprint 4 It's all about the bookings

Equipment Booking

The big value item on this sprint was the equipment (boat) booking.  Last sprint I added the basic inventory so that I had something to book against.  The booking story starts when a person, who is on a trip, wants to find and book a boat. The boat needs to be available for the duration of the trip (or possibly longer).  Being available means that the boat isn't in repair, is suitable for trips and hasn't been booked by someone else for the same duration.

Here are the new screens.

The user starts off with no equipment booked, so clicks on the Book Equipment tab.

The user can then search for available boats.  The dates default to those of the trip but can be changed if the user requires an earlier pickup or drop off date.  Available boats are returned and can then be booked. 

Once booked the boat is listed in the booked section underneath.  The booking can be cancelled if the user changes their mind.

After booking a boat, the trip summary page shows the boat underneath the user that booked it along with the booking dates.

Stakeholder Meetings

I held two stakeholder meetings this sprint.  

The first was with the club treasurer.  I wanted to get a better understanding of how he gets the information about the trips so that he can effectively charge the participants.  I had assumed that the treasurer trawled the forum for the information, but that is not the case.  He receives trip reports from the trip organisers which contain what actually happened rather than what was planned.  I was provided with a few examples of this from the whitewater section.  This has lead to the drafting of a new set of user stories that allow the trip organisers to post-event adjust details of the trip and then approve the trip so that the treasurer picks up the correct information.  This extra piece of work is quite sizeable, but still manageable and not all will be required for the Minimum Viable Product.

The second meeting was with the club equipment officers.  I wanted to understand better what they need to send the the SBOAC each week and where they get the information from.  The equipment officers confirmed that they find the information on the trips threads and let the basin know which drivers are going to access the basin at what times. The equipment officers kindly provided me with examples of these emails and also the basin access windows documents.

Both of these sessions were very useful and I gained a lot of good understanding.  I'm intending to hold more of these sessions with other key members of the club such as the chair and the area reps.  All meetings were held using Zoom which I could use to share my screen and show progress.

Backlog Management

After the meetings I spent a few hours adding in new user stories and re-arranging the backlog in a way that made it possible to complete work on the feature sets.  This then makes it easier for me to prioritise work and understand how close I'm getting to the minimum viable product.  I'm hoping that within the next sprint or two I'll have completed the feature sets that are currently active and be able to move onto the next tranche.

Velocity

Four sprints into the project and I'm averaging 20 story points per sprint.  This is a good steady rate, but will probably increase as the major decisions are made and the build cycles become more rhythmic.