Agile & Scrum, STATSCORE life, STATSCORE people, STATSCORE teams

Spend one day with us!

At STATSCORE we spend every single day on providing high-quality products to our customers. Maybe you’ve wondered, how it works behind the scenes. How do we organize our work to fulfil the market’s expectations? I’m happy to provide an answer and I invite you to join us and spend one day with IT Team. Let’s begin! But first things first, we’ll need some coffee…

Thanks to a cup of aromatic coffee we are able to begin our day with a focus on our job. But wait… What we’re supposed to do? What’s the plan for today? These questions mean only one thing – it’s daily stand-up time.

Stand-up? Do you guys just tell jokes in the morning? Not quite. Daily stand-up is a meeting that starts every day of our work. It lasts up to 15 minutes. During that time we discuss our progress, we come up with a plan for the current day and we try to solve obstacles if any appear and block us from reaching the sprint goals.

Read more: First day at STATSCORE – the guide for the beginners

Plan for the day doesn’t mean that each of us spends the whole day in separate rooms working on his task. Every day is full of discussions, debates and consultations. And according to Agile Manifesto, we value individuals and interactions over processes and tools. We rather change the course than rely on huge documentation.

In our Team, we have a rule of starting work with the right-hand side of the Team Board. That means looking at “testing” first and then moving to tasks waiting for Code Review. After that, we can focus on the “in progress” section. The aim of that process is keeping the workflow fluid.

The purpose of the test is making sure that any given task has been completed within the acceptance criteria. We use testing scenarios so we can describe precisely when the software is functioning undesirably.

Code review is a mechanism helping us to maintain the high quality of our code.

Whew… we’ve managed to test two tasks, take a look at Code review and add other features to the new functionality. We’ve deserved a break and lunch. Can we just sit in the kitchen, bring our food and get back to our desk? Sure, we can. But why not to make that break just a little more exciting?

How can we do it? Well… we’re a company strongly related to sports and we have a table football in the kitchen. We put these two together and we get a Table Football League that connects people from different departments. Emotion, passion, commitment and most annoying, accidentally conceded goals – those are the inseparable accents that come with our lunch break. Today is the day when we easily beat our rival and take a lead in the table. We can proudly get back to work, listening to our rivals complains. Still, for some time phrases like “lucky”, “unfair”, “next time” and “how did it go in?!” come to our ears.

At the same time, we remind ourselves about today’s meeting where we’ll be analyzing new tasks. We take a quick look at the documentation to prepare for the discussion. We fill another cup with our favourite coffee and meet the rest of the Team in the conference room.

Product Owner takes us through the requirements, most important aspects and mockups. Then the whole team tries to come up with the best solution. After reaching a consensus, we split a big user story into separate tasks. We finish of with planning poker. Done? Yeah… we can get back to programming.

Next hours flow nicely, our favourite music comes into our ears from headphones and with each new line of code, we are a step closer to reaching sprint goals.

Work is going smooth, so more and more tasks move to the right side of the team board. Burndown chart indicates that our estimations about the amount of work for the sprint are probably going to be fine.

Read more: How to use the user stories properly

Still, there is something that bothers us. Strange, undefined feeling that stops us from focusing on our work. Is it a fear of the unknown? Existential thoughts about our existence? Analyze of current geopolitical situation of the world? Not quite, we’re just getting hungry.

No surprise, our last meal happened seven paragraphs ago. The golden rule of programming says: “You won’t write good code when you’re hungry!”. Well, that rule may not exist, but it would fit in here. We’re about to take yesterday’s sandwich of the rucksack and then, suddenly we grin from ear to ear. That’s because we’ve just reminded ourselves that it’s pizza day!

At lunchtime we meet everybody in the kitchen we empty another box with the usual conversations in the background. We still didn’t figure out why pizza gathers more developers than the rest of the meetings…

After a few hours spent on programming, there’s time for the last accent of the day, which is Scrum training. We are constantly trying to improve our skills and knowledge, so we take the opportunity and raise awareness in the team about new standards, solutions and frameworks.

Before we leave work, we again prove to our mate that the last table football win wasn’t an accident. Now we can calmly get back home with the feeling of the well spent day. In our calendar, we start counting to the next pizza day…

This is what we do at STATSCORE. We always take care, to provide our partners with software that will help them reach their business goals. If you want to become part of the STATSCORE team, check the latest vacancies, as we build the biggest sports data centre in the world.