Today’s lesson was not usual. My usual teacher is in vacation, so we have conference calls and we are trying to imitate different situations during conf. calls.

Situation
Initially there was an agreement with the Client for a particular scope of project.  After some time the Client adds more features that require additional time for investigation and execution – in particular he wants to change the user interface (UI) from HTML to FLEX. It’s high time to start working on user interface but the Client is silent regarding reconsideration of the agreement terms. Project Manager has to take charge of conducting a negotiation with the Client and decides to invite Tech Lead, QA and Senior Developer for that.

Roles has been assigned to students. And initially I got TL role, but when we dialed up we discovered that 3 of us are not present, so teacher decided that I could take 3 roles in one time.

Roles are following:

Tech Lead: You do not know FLEX and you do not have time to study it because it is time consuming. But you believe that it is possible to fulfill all the requirements if your PM can find a specialist in that technology and make him TL of that part of the project.

Senior Developer:  You have used FLEX before. You are not an expert in it but you can do the task. However, you require more time (you have your own tasks which you have to finish in time) and you also need more people.  Anyway, there should be reconsideration of the agreement terms.

QA: You know that whenever a new feature is added, it always involves adding test cases and plans rewriting. You are 100% sure that this change will require extra effort for testing. Besides, the integration of a new feature will lead to the additional integration testing.

I was trying to be in all of them and I would say that I succeeded in those.One of interesting things about this is that I was dialing from my desk, and one of the colleagues was really confused about what I’m talking out there… Maybe he was concerned if I’m not mad, but teacher said that it was tremendous :)

I got a lot of fun and I really appreciate that my company game me possibility to learn English in lot of fun and enjoyable ways.