As this was an internal project and no one but us would pay for it, it was developed in our spare time (that we’ve tracked with Jenna!!!) and using many of the good practices recommended by most of the agile methodologies…

• We couldn’t be closer to the customer, it was us
• We’ve depended on the right tools, that’s why we used Grails to develop it
• One good idea and one brainstorming meeting to discover the main features
• Just two short sprints (one to record time, and one for Jenna to ask for it)
• One great design meeting
• A few sessions of pair programming (although we sit all in the same room)
• Two of our best coders taking turns to develop it

The results

• Using Grails and IntelliJ Idea, took Alejandro less than one week to bring us a web application that keeps time estimates and assignments (this keeping in mind that he was assigned to another Java project as well!!!)
• With this as the founding rock, he developed Jenna chatting characters and its customizable moods – by now, she is a gorgeous blonde-
• Then it was time for Dario – a great Java developer – to learn Grails while enhancing the chat engine to make it more scalable and in the process, try to make the screens look better
• By this time, we’ve put much less than 15 days effort to build this application, now was time to Go Live with it. Nicolas, our Operations Officer, loaded all of our assignments and let Jenna do the rest!!!
• Now, every day at 18hs, Jenna asks for my numbers and it’s really great having forgot about this and knowing that Nicolas spends so little time controlling our assignments