Internship at DEVCake

My name is Bart Kuijer and I'm currently doing a course in Game Technology and Producing at the Saxion. For this course I am doing a 20 week internship at DEVCake, a software development company that is specialized in VR, AR and Gamification. This 4 man company has already released some applications, including a training tool for nursing students to practice delivering bad news to clients. Recently they have been working on a VR driving lessons application (called VR Rijlessen) of which they already made a functional demo to show to possible clients.

During this internship I will focus on transforming a prototype of the VR Rijlessen application into a sellable product. This will include dynamically loading all the data used in the application. I will also be  creating an editor where you can create new Scenarios  and edit existing ones for use within the app. Progress in these scenarios will be tracked, and the difficulty will be changed depending on the skill level of the user. The last part of the application will consist of a web server where user progress is saved and their licenses will be stored.

The planning for these days is done in sprints of 2 weeks. the first day of a sprint we spend a lot of time creating the backlog (a list of tasks specific for this sprint). All tasks in the backlog are assigned a time that they are expected to take to get done. Every day we select a few of these items from our backlog based on their priority within the sprint and the amount of time they are expected to take. Every morning we select the tasks that fit our day and continue to work on them. At the end of the sprint we hold a sprint review, where we all discuss how the sprint went, if we had any difficulties and what we want to improve for the next sprint. These sprints always run from Wednesday to Tuesday. This is done to make sure that everybody will be able to be present during a sprint review since not everybody is available on Wednesday till Friday.

 

The average day at DEVCake.

A day starts at 9:00: We grab some coffee and hold a daily standup. During the daily standup everybody tells what they did the day before and what they are planning to do the rest of the day. Any possible requirements from others can also be discussed during this moment.

At about 9:15 we start working. We have a list on trello (A website for making scrum boards) with all tasks that need to be done so that others can also see what you are working on. To track the time we spend on projects we use Toggl, which is a timer application that tracks the time we spend doing things and gives us the possibility to assign it to a project. This way we can make sure we don't spend too much time on specific tasks and it gives us an overview of what time we actually spend working during a sprint.

around 12:00 we take a small break to have lunch and stretch our legs. We either take a walk trough the city or the nearby park.

at 12:30 we continue working until 17:00, at this time we will pack our stuff and head home.