About

An application for managing a hotel, from room maintenance to hotel guests.

Built in 4 months as part of a team of 5 developers.

Training assignment

This was the final assignment for an 8-month-long 'Software Engineer' training conducted by Spectrum multimedia & IT in collaboration with Capgemini Academy.

We learned PHP, Laravel, and things like:

- working as a team

- using the Scrum framework

- customer communication and collaboration

- giving presentations.

Taking this course really improved both my soft skills and work quality, there was a big focus on things like writing clean code and following a structured workflow.

It was often very challenging but a lot of fun to do!

Building process

Following Scrum we worked in 3-week sprints, 5 sprints in total. At the end of each sprint we had a review where we got together with a simulated customer to show our results and communicate what to do next.

We used the first sprint to create:

- page designs (mock-ups)

- diagrams for the different pieces of functionality needed (flowcharts)

- diagrams for how to structure our data (ERD's)

Doing this really helped us clearly communicate with the customer, and made it easier to implement everything later on.

The other sprints we implemented the different systems, some examples of our sprint goals:

- implement rooms management

- work out functionality for reservations

- implement payments bookkeeping

Challenges

We did have some slip-ups, for example our customer was unsatisfied because she didn't have a clear grasp on what progress we're making, making it difficult to prioritize the next steps.

After communicating what the problem was, we changed the structure of our sprint reviews & started sending emails to update her on intermediate steps we completed.

This quickly resolved the issue! I also felt less distance to the customer after this.

I played a big part in improving this, I understand how fundemental communication is in basically everything so pushed our team to make changes.

Conclusion

It was sometimes tough to make decisions and keep the team aligned, but through clear, honest communication and regular retrospection I believe we created quite a well functioning team! Especially considering we were really still trying to figure things out.