Author: nathanm522

I began my eighth and final day at Field2Base by attending my last development teams stand-up meeting. After the meeting, I talked to Howard. Howard showed me the xml code for the workflow that companies can use with their forms to determine how final forms get directed to supervisors or their final destination for storage or use. I spent the morning working with Howard to not only learn how this system works but also to QA a form that uses this feature to help identify a bug to be fixed by the developers. This workflow feature is interesting because it also allows supervisors to approve or deny forms and send them back to the original source to be revised to be filled correctly. This can be useful in companies where there are lots of forms being produced and no one checking their validity, it can make mistakes occur less often. After lunch, the employees had an all-company meeting so I had a chance to say goodbye one last time to everyone.

Today was my second to last day at Field2Base and Milen’s last day here. When we arrived, we as always attended the development team’s stand-up meeting, and after that we attended a weekly grooming meeting. In this meeting the development team went through Story cases stored on Jira, an online planning software, and assigned Story point values to each of them as well as editing descriptions to fit with their current goals. After this, we spent the rest of the morning helping Mary Quality Assure some forms for customers and helped her fix multiple bugs on a different form. Then we ate lunch. After lunch, we relaxed for a while and Milen said his goodbyes to everyone we have worked with over the past two weeks. Then, Howard talked to us about how the EForm files store their data and how the tablets would read this and convert it into an interactive form in a matter of milliseconds. After this, we took a couple pictures and headed home for the evening.

Today was our sixth day at Field2base. As always, we began our day by attending the stand-up meeting. After stand-up, we were given an assignment to have a region on a form output the time zone for any United States Zip Code that a user could input. After trying various API options with no success, I had the idea of finding an excel spreadsheet with all this data contained within it. After getting this functioning, I realized that daylight savings time would be an issue that could make this not work correctly during about half of the calendar year. Due to this issue, I had to essentially start completely over in my approach but luckily the spreadsheet I had already found did contain this data. I spent the rest of the morning coding the form to correctly find the date and check whether daylight savings time was active, and if it was, take it into account. Once I had this all set up it was time for lunch. After lunch Milen and I attended the development team’s meeting in review of their seventh “sprint,” which is a term for a two week period of progress using the Agile methodology. I am looking forward to my next and final two days at Field2Base!

Milen and I began our fifth day at Field2Base by once again attending the development team’s daily stand- up meeting. After the meeting, we helped Mary with part of a form for a customer. In this form, we pulled from a spreadsheet to output a branch name, number, and up to six relevant email addresses to be displayed on a page and automatically used throughout the filling of the form as a whole. After we scripted the SQL for this to function, we tested the form both in forms designer’s preview mode and on an android tablet to assure the new functionality worked with no issues. After this, we started another form for Mary except this time from scratch. Given the form backgrounds, we built the buttons and functionality in order for the user to navigate the form and have extra pages appear when needed at the press of a button. After lunch, we had a video call with another one of the developers, Ravi. Ravi lives in Charlottesville Virginia so he works remotely for the development team. We talked with him for about an hour about his career path and his thoughts on the software industry as a whole, given how constantly evolving it is and that personal education in the software field is constant and doesn’t stop after college. Once we were done talking to Ravi we continued work on the form for Mary. We finished the functionality of that form and headed home for the evening.

Today was our fourth day at Field2Base. Milen and I began our day by once again attending the development team’s daily stand-up meeting. Then, we talked to Mary and helped create a section of a form for a construction company. We had to use drop-down menus which pulled their options from an online excel file in order to determine the options, and then based on the user’s choice from the first selection, it would autofill another column with a matching response. Once we eventually figured out how to make this form work, we uploaded the form to Field2Base’s QA account and tested the form for any errors on a tablet. Then, we talked to Howard, who holds a similar position to Mary. Then, we started a project that Howard had created for us, using the knowledge we’ve amassed to create a form using more complex forms of all the regions and techniques that we have learned the past few days and this morning. After a few hours of working on this form using forms designer and all the reference materials on the website, we completed the assignment and got the form working in the test environment.

Milen and I had our third day at Field2Base today. As per usual, we began our day by attending the development team’s daily stand-up meeting. Then, we listened in on a ‘grooming’ meeting the development team had. In this meeting they went over various stories that were to be worked on in the coming weeks and revised their plans as well as decided how much time and energy they were willing to devote to that feature or fix. Then, we talked to Mike, the iOS developer for Field2Base’s Mobile Forms application. Mike talked to us about how development for the iOS platform works and the tools and programs he uses to code for iPhones and iPads. He told us about how he got the position he is now and why he thinks the software industry is flourishing as much as it has been. Then we had lunch. There was a food truck in the parking lot serving employees of the various companies in the building, so we ate food from there. After lunch, Mary, a member of the professional services team, talked to us about what she does at Field2Base. She showed us how if companies would rather have the mobile forms designed for them instead of designing them themselves, they can pay her hourly to create those forms. Rachel then had us practice some scripting examples of what this work would consist of and after some brief Q&A we were once again done for the day.

Today, we attended the daily development team stand-up meeting again, as we did yesterday and will each day of the coming weeks. After the stand-up, which is used to check in on progress and set-backs, a more long-form sit-down development meeting took place that Milen and I also attended in order to get a better feel for how the development team works through creating new features and fixing existing bugs in a timely manner. Rachel then showed us the various websites and programs that the development team use to track their progress through the current “sprint” (a two-week period of planned development), through individual issues and features called “stories” which make up groups called “epics.” Another website Rachel showed us was used for tracking customer reports of bugs as well as suggestions for potential new features. All this planning is necessary to keep the team on task and on schedule with their fixes and new content in order to keep customer’s forms all working correctly and keep customers interested in staying in business with Field2Base. Milen and I then learned how to use Field2Base’s DIM (Data Integration Module) software, which is used for companies to import their form data into the various departments that would use that data, such as sending financial information to an accounting department or names into a database. After lunch, we talked to the product manager Brendan about the suite of products offered and how customers use them to optimize their systems. Brendan also talked to us about he company’s website and all its offerings.

Today was our first day at Field2Base, a company which specializes in mobile forms, digitization of information, and sending of said information to a central location for anything from small businesses to large companies. Milen and I were introduced to the development team and to the few members of the sales team who were there at the time. We then attended the development team’s daily Agile stand-up meeting. In this meeting all the members discussed the progress they had made in the last day, any issue they had come across, and their plans for today. Then, Rachel talked to Milen and I about the history of the company, which was founded in 2002, and the company’s goals for the coming years. Rachel talked more about her personal history and why she enjoys working at Field2Base. We then went out to lunch with Rachel and two other members of the development team to Neomonde. When we got back Milen and I digitized a sample form in order to familiarize ourselves with the technology and how the admin side of the forms work as well as how employees of clients would use the software. Later in the afternoon we met the remaining members of the sales team and downloaded the Field2Base app on our phones in order to see how the forms we digitized would look in the hands of a customer. I’m looking forward to the next two weeks and learning more about Field2Base and software development!