The D-Day challenge
As you’ve probably heard, we run a D-Day every quarter . This time we decided to build something really cool and tangible. We gathered teams and we discussed 12 ideas on Wednesday to prepare and craft ready products on Friday.
We are the Makers!
At Desmart, we love creating new things – both online and offline. You’ve seen how we’ve renovated our office and it was a great activity to practice teamwork. Everyone got engaged and it was a lot of fun. Building something together makes us feel responsible for it and motivates us to deliver something cool people can actually use.
Why does it matter?
When you make the decision about what you want to create, you are really passionate about it. You inspire others to join your team, you are even willing to stay after hours to complete your projects. This is exactly what happened with the Arcade Project. The D-Day was over at 5 PM on Friday, but the team members who were working on this machine stayed in the office until 9 PM. If you give people space, tools and just a little bit of inspiration, you can be very surprised with the results. Our CEO Piotr said that it was the best D-Day ever. Let’s see what made him so proud of this edition.
Results
We’ve completed 9 projects:
- The most impressive and the most advanced project was the Arcade machine with sensors, joystick, loudspeakers and a screen. At the end of the day we could already play with it. It was amazing!
- Desmart’s website – Karolina, our new UX Designer, had a chance to work on a real project. We improved many small things: we implemented a ”Get a Quote button” and we polished the copy on the website. Using the heat maps, we are able to measure the impact of the introduced changes.
- Training – Bartek, our Project Manager, in cooperation with Lucjan, our senior software developer, prepared a session entitled “How to create great user stories”. They were inspired on the conference Agile By Example which they attended last week.
- Arduino – 3 software developers were experimenting with Arduino, there were colorful lights and they presented the controller to ODD Drive.
- Our Front-End developer created a new game in the browser where you could jump and collect coins.
- The iOS developers have created 2 games in SWIFT language – a Nimble game and just a Game
- Additionally, our testers and developers were running unit tests on Android as well as automated Java tests. It was a really valuable lesson for everyone.
- We were also experimenting with Node.js, Sails.js, Angular.js + Material Design – as a final product we got a Bookmark Manager.
What happens next?
The knowledge we gain during the D-Days is always extremely useful. We learn how to deliver a product within a well defined short period of time and how to share this with other team members. We’ve also learnt how to present our ideas effectively.
In just 90 seconds see how great our D-day was:
