Public access to videos of our weekly meetings and design discussions will soon be available, providing more information about the different technologies and practices that we're using. For developers, this should help provide answers and make work on the project easier; it will also provide an archive of our project's process. A link to the videos will be provided soon.

The Astea Solutions Sophie Team.

It's been a while since we last reported our progress. Now it's time to catch up and inform you about Sophie 2.0 status.

Because we didn't completely finish ITERATION_02 in time and with the desired result, we scheduled an additional ITERATION_02b in order to complete all of the tasks left from previous iterations and make the quality of the product even higher. As we were in the process of increasing staff on the team during ITERATION-02, we began and designed most of the tasks but some of them were not completely finished. With the addition of the new developers, we were able to complete ITERATION-02b successfully. Some of the highlights of this development were the creation of the project and development overviews, and our progress on server related tasks (although some demo pages were already created).

Results from the retrospection of ITERATION_02b:

What went well:

• Additional developers were added to the team
• Many useful discussions
• Most tasks were finished
• Very good productivity at the end of the sprint
• Three day full team technology meetings in Sofia including our US-based team members

What could be better:

• We didn't finish every task
• New machines on order are needed
• The office environment could be improved (too much noise)
• Some tasks were not sufficiently described

How to improve:

• Have more design discussions
• Start hard tasks earlier
• Focus on PLATFORM_STANDARDS
• No new code developed on the last day of an iteration
• Weekly task boxing
• More information about development tools in the wiki

Another thing worth mentioning is the expanded team's infrastructure. Since we have more staff working on more tasks, we've decided to split the team in order to achieve better productivity and quality. Each team member is now assigned to a specific team (for example, Main, Base, Extra, Server, Analysis, and Release). More detailed information will be included in the process page. We're all looking forward to our first release scheduled for December 15!

The Astea Solutions Sophie Team.