First team meeting: Database model & story board

Last Sunday, we had our first team meeting. Two of the action items for the day were the design of the database model, and the creation of a story board for the application. The database model should include all the models, entities, relationships, as well as the fields associated to each entity. On the other hand, the story board  for the application is a detailed sequence of each screen which users are going to see when they are working with our application. Therefore, thanks to the story board, we could easily understand what we were putting, and where.

OK, that was the idea. At the beginning, we scheduled to do first the database model, and we actually started working on it using a big whiteboard provided by Matthew. When it seemed we had an acceptable model and moved to the story board, we quickly noticed that we forgot to add several entities, relations and fields on our tentative database model.

For this reason, I realized the importance of such a simple thing like a story board. To build it, it is very important that ALL the members of the team take part, because some characteristics or functionalities of each window could be overlooked. We finally got a well-detailed story board, which was also very helpful to complete the database model at the same time we added new stuff, as well as fix any previous database decisions. Apart from all I wrote so far, and based on the first team meeting experience, I would like to say two additional comments about the use of a story board when we face a new project:

1. Once the team gets an "officially" complete story board (this includes an accurate review by the team members), it may be interesting and especially useful, to share it with an outsider (several persons outside the project, if it is possible), because he/she could find mistakes or overlooked parts, even new features that nobody in the team thought before.

2. A good and accurate story board ensures an easier user story design. Our client claims for a "great user story, that absolutely will work by project completion", so if you have a great story board, you will have most of the work done to create an user story that satisfies your client expectations.

I always believe we can take advantage of our mistakes, and I will put more attention to the story board design in future software projects.