Last week was a very short week with both a bank holiday and a day of annual leave. Despite this it was probably more productive than previous weeks.
On Tuesday I attended a show and tell to see the work that’s been done over the last sprint. It’s great to see things starting to come together. We also had a general pre-sprint planning catch up and team retrospective.
On Wednesday we started the first round of user testing the online service. We tested with both DVLA staff in Swansea and members of the public in Birmingham. This round has highlighted some things we can change now to make the service simpler and confirmed some suspicions we had. It has also given us some things to investigate further – it’s important not to jump to conclusions from just one round of testing.
The team area now has a TV for us to display various dashboards. It’s taken us a little while to get this, but it’s an important step to help us make what we are doing more visible. I also had some productive conversations around meeting the service standard and using the Service Manual.
Wednesday was also the first time we’ve been able to get a decent portion of the team together out of working hours on a social basis.
As we started work before the service manual was released we now have some stories in our backlog to update our approach to a couple of things such as our look and feel (like using an alpha/beta header instead of the normal GOV.UK header). We’ve also moved some of our work on the data model into the main backlog now that we have a better idea of what we are trying to do.
Finally, Friday was spent enjoying a mixture of Sci-Fi and good food.
As Mike would say – onwards (sorry, couldn’t resist).