mike kozelsky

At work (doolli.com), we’re doing a big (2-3 months worth of work) UX overhaul of our front end for the core portion of the website.  As somebody that primarily focuses on the back end, there isn’t a whole lot of development for me to do for this.  Because of this, the workload isn’t very balanced across the team.  Theoretically, i can jump into the front end code base and start helping, as any good developer can do.  However, not being familiar with it, we determined that the back end guys would be a burden to the existing front end developers having to field questions or explain this or that, or having to check to see if something that we did was already built in a utility somewhere.  So we’ve been spending some time doing a little bit of work and refactoring the back end code, but then there’s not much else to do in terms of cleanup.

Here’s three things that i have taken up doing during this time.

Analysis

There’s a lot of work to be done with figuring out and defining what’s coming up next.  I’ve spent time talking with our product team and help generate a runway of ready work.  I’m and talking to people that have ideas of how things should behave, asking lots of questions, and writing up requirements.  Since we have a relatively small team, doing this helps alleviate some of the workload that would be coming up for some of the other guys.  Hopefully it’ll mean that the front end developers can focus on the current work and don’t have to get distracted with questions about upcoming work.  It should also help during our upcoming sprint planning meetings – we should be able to be a bit more efficient during them so that we can get the meeting over with and get back to work.

Extensions and Plugins

There’s not much functionality changing with our product, but we’ve been tossing around ideas about “wouldn’t it be cool if we integrated with X”.  This period of not being inundated with work to do is a great opportunity to explore these things.  So far i’ve mostly completed a Google Forms add-on (create a form that mimics the fields in your database and capture all responses in the database), and explored what a Zapier app might look like.  Being able to have these things add credibility and maturity to our product.

When in doubt, QA

It was a while along in the effort when we were finally ready to hand off a deployment for the QA team to verify.  But as things have been progressing, our QA guys are getting swamped.  We have an automated test suite that they have to update and maintain.  Helping our with the manual QA verification of new features is something anybody can help with.  And, it happens to be that i am the only one doing QA that has a windows touchscreen computer.  Most of the rest of the team uses Macs.  So i’ve found a slew of bugs where things don’t work on windows or specifically with a touch interface.  Also, i’m able to jump on a few other devices, utilizing the in-office ipad and android tablets.