Goals for the Week of 2/16/09 (Week 6)

This week is planned to be a developer ramp-up week. Beginning last Friday, I've been assigning small coding exercises meant to encourage everyone to refresh their programming skills. These exercises are designed to push each team member to learn what will be necessary to develop the OnBoard Mobile site.

So far, the team has been assigned 2 exercises. The first of which, very few people managed to complete. The second was more successful for the team. The exercises were:

• Implement ASP.NET's custom errors feature to display a friendly error message to the user when an exception is thrown.
• Write a FizzBuzz algorithm that outputs the results in a 4 x 25 table.

The newest assignment is an exercise to practice primarily JavaScript skills. The team will have to create required field & regular expression validation code to validate a simple form.

Next week we plan to begin more project-focused development specifically contributing to the final OnBoard Mobile deliverable. This will begin once mockups & prototypes are finished.

The next set of project deliverables to be produced are:

• Full site map, including all pages being created for the site and how they relate to one another.
• List of changes needed to the detailed requirements document needed to begin development.
• List of what requirements fall under specific pages of the site so that programmers have a spec to design pages against.

Issues & Concerns

The team almost unanimously struggled with the exception handling assignment. This is a concern because it shows that the development team is not fully prepared to begin the project. The exercises I'm giving this week are designed to help overcome that problem and push the team members to improve their skills to the level expected to do this project.