This week, my teammates and I narrowed down our MVP (Minimum Viable Product) down to the core aspects of the recruitment cycle. These include employee information storage, role-based access control, job board management, application tracking, resume parsing, interview scheduling, candidate pipeline management, and automatic notifications. Given the scope of the project, which is approximately five months, we had to make the difficult decision to cut back on the human capital related items from the MVP. These included things such as performance management, payroll tools, and time related features. This gives our team an opportunity to build a complete application within the given timeframe.
I will likely be working on the backend side of things because I have the most experience in the tech stack that we’re using. I had to do a bit of research regarding our database because we will be storing a massive amount of data. For the time being, PostgreSQL will give us sufficient space to house all of the organization, employee, and applicant information. I considered using NoSQL solutions such as MongoDB or even Cassandra but felt as though we will benefit from the relationship format of SQL.
Next, we worked on the agile aspect of the project using a Jira Kanban board to initialize backlog items I recently learned that Kanban means visual signal in Japanese, which makes sense after building out the basics of our backlog. I found it challenging to estimate story points because I don’t have a complete understanding of my teammates workflow yet. We meet up a couple of times a week to discuss the project and what our goals with it are. Ultimately, according to the Agile Manifesto, “Working software is the primary measure of progress.” Once we get core functionalities out of the way we can then move onto all of the bells and whistles.
Next week we will begin planning sprints, which will likely adapt over time. I look forward to the development of our application.