A bit over a year ago I wrote about Demanding Technical Excellence . I’ve also written a bit about our Boot Camp program. We’ve recently just completed our 10th Boot Camp, and I thought I’d share some results. I mention the previous articles because I think the results speak strongly to both of these articles.
Boot Camp 10 was a smaller Boot Camp, consisting of initially 14 members, but reduced to 12 members by the time the Boot Camp was complete.
One of the key aspects of our Boot Camps is for the team to put what they’re learning about during the day into practical use in the evenings as they implement a project over the course of two, one-week Sprints. During the Sprints they are expected to follow the full Scrum framework, from Sprint Planning through Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective. Each Sprint they are expected to produce a potentially shippable product increment. In many Boot Camps, including Boot Camp 10, I am the Product Owner.
True to the Agile Manifesto value of “individuals and interactions over process and tools”, we try to do things which support an individual and team focused environment. One of these things is to provide teams with a small budget which can be used every couple of months to celebrate significant milestones. We refer to these as team building activities. There is a simple process of approval and expense report filing that are associated with this activity. Traditionally this had been done in email, which worked OK, but a common problem was tracking how frequently individuals were participating in team building activities.
Boot Camp 10’s project was to automate this system, assuring that only eligible team members could be added to a team building request, and providing a repository of historical team building requests.
The results of this Boot Camp directly demonstrate some of the key concepts we associate with technical excellence. In addition to the Scrum framework being applied to the domain of project management, numerous Agile engineering practices were also applied throughout the project. These included:
- Version control
- Continuous integration (established by the team at the beginning of the project and used consistently throughout the project)
- Test driven development
- Pair Programming
- Automated functional testing
- Automated quality review
While the application is simple (see the screenshots below), the results of the teams two, one-week Sprints were quite remarkable. Despite being interns who are still enrolled in university, who were new to both Scrum and Agile engineering practices when they joined us, they were able to effectively apply both and successfully deliver potentially shippable product increments across both Sprints.
Equally impressive to their producing a production ready application (which we are truly using) was there commitment to technical excellence. While all of our teams do an excellent job insuring quality, Boot Camp 10 was our first Boot Camp to achieve a perfectly clean Sonar report, as depicted in the screen shot below.
Look at that report. No blocker, critical, major, minor, or even info violations, 90.3% code coverage with 183 tests, all passing, and no code duplication. The application is beautiful, both ascetically and technically.
I’m proud this Boot Camp team has truly aspired to Demand Technical Excellence of themselves, and they delivered. While as noted in last year’s post about Perficient being the best school in Hangzhou, our Boot Camp satisfies the Agile Engineering Practices component of the Certified Scrum Developer program, but this is the first Boot Camp where the delivery has satisfied our internal criteria making the team members eligible for this certification.
Here’s a picture of the Boot Camp 10 team. Keep a eye on these superstars: they’re going to go places!
Boot Camp 1o Team Members
From left to right: Jack Ye, Hunter Huang, Jeffery Ge, Tony Deng, Daniel Cao, Minna Wang,
Eric Wang, Jen Zhou, Bevin Ye, Stone Zhang, Leo Li, Shadow Zhu
not appearing in the photo is Vorce Shen
My congratulations to Boot Camp 10. I can’t wait to see this success carried forward into our next Boot Camp.
