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Intelligent Coach

Introduction

During my bachelor’s in winter semester 21/22, I was involved in a software project. There were several projects that you could apply for using software and then be randomly assigned based on your stated priorities. I was assigned to the Intelligent Coach project, and it was scheduled to develop three versions for each internal software project. So I ended up in the third group, Intelligent Coach 3. Each group consisted of a total of seven team members (including project manager and quality representative)

The project included a large part of the software engineering process: Raise requirements, develop a specification together with the product owner, create user stories, hold weekly scrum meetings, put together a vision video, agile project management, continuously work through the product backlog, meet deadlines and complete paperwork.

We used JIRA to organize and process the user stories and to communicate with the PO.

Target

Intelligent Coach is a software aimed at students of our university to help them with their presentations in the proseminar and the defense of their thesis. The core feature of Intelligent Coach is analyzing presentation slides and giving students recommendation about their created slides. These suggestions include recommendations on text size, fonts and text quantity. Integrated help functions and tutorials should help to navigate within the application.

Students can register, activate and manage their own account via email address. Furthermore, administrators have additional rights. Users can share their presentations with friends and colleagues, so that they can view and also comment them.

So in summary, the Intelligent Coach is designed to support students in their presentation skills so that lessons are learned from the negative experiences of the teaching staff.

Team

We agreed on Carl as the project manager. We exchanged ideas about our strengths and relatively quickly determined who was best suited for which focus in the project. Jonathan and Carl focused on working in our frontend (React, Design).

First nameLast nameResponsibility
CarlPiepgrasProject manager
JonathanKringsQuality representative
PatrickMüllerDeveloper
YusufMandiraliDeveloper
JanGabriel-JürgensDeveloper
ChristophHlavaDeveloper
YevgenTytovDeveloper
Team overview

My area of responsibility was in the backend, where I implemented a RESTful API with Yusuf using Spring Boot in Java to realize our backend requirements. We have made documentation for the API using Postman. Together with my colleagues, I created user stories with points in JIRA to work through later on. I paid attention to deadlines and after a short time took over the entire communication with our product owner, which was perceived as a relatively unpopular task. The submission of the specification, the delivery of our project in general, fell particularly within my scope.

General process

After a short introduction period, exploration phase for three weeks began in which groups had to elaborate software specification (negotiation with product owner, write use cases and create vision video). Shortly after exploration, it was expected that the groups submit both specification and vision video.

During the next three weeks, PO expected a functional working core from us, which already has to contain the most important features. This is due to the influence that the PO still wanted to have on the second development iteration phase and the final result of our software. In iteration II, the goal of this phase was to feature-complete Intelligent Coach. In the final development phase, the polishing phase consisted of fixing bugs and finishing touches.

Finally, each group was to present their finished product in a big blue button video conference and feedback was given.

Key learnings

As noted, two other teams existed that worked with the product owner. One team raised very high expectations from the beginning by announcing that they would use artificial intelligence instead of focusing on relevant core features first, what we did. Our time management was very good, and we knew the strengths and weaknesses of our team. This allowed us to appear very confident towards the PO.

My impression was that at least the other team was not convincing, and our PO even seemed dissatisfied (especially with the user interface). My honest impression at the end of submission phase was that our team delivered the best software piece out of all three teams!

Lastly, I would like to thank my entire team, especially Jonathan and Carl, who built the frontend independently using their prior work experience from working student jobs at some companies located near Hanover, Germany. They were responsible for the slide reviews and suggestions for improvement, which is the main feature of Intelligent Coach.

Vision video

Resources