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2025
Software Development Life Cycle was a hands-on, 11 Week experience - August, September and October of 2025; 90 Individuals from around the world came together to tackle real life problems and create the right solutions.
SDLC Experience Workshop
Team 01
Dedication. Expertise. Passion.
Our team represents six countries, five time zones, and a wide range of levels of experience.
When we formed, we were a group of strangers - now we are a working team!
Problem Statement:
Sip Split: Project Reporting Dashboard
Splitting shared expenses after group outings or events often leads to confusion, awkwardness, and errors. Friends struggle to determine individual contributions, track payments, or calculate totals fairly.
Key pain points:
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Lack of a simple, transparent system for splitting bills.
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Manual calculations that lead to mistakes and tension among friends.
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No existing lightweight web solution that combines simplicity, accessibility, and accuracy.
Solution Statement
We developed Sip Split, a simple and user-friendly web application that allows users to:
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Input the number of participants and total bill amount manually.
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Automatically split the bill equally and display a clear breakdown for each participant.
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Deployed o google firebase
The solution was built to be scalable, accessible and supported by desktop and mobile
Kanban (Agile)
The Kanban Board is a visual project management tool used to track tasks and progress across workflow stages, typically To Do, In Progress, Under Review, and Done. it entails:
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Clear task organization by status.
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Assignment of ownership (PM, BA, QA, Dev, UI/UX).
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Real-time progress tracking.
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Visual control of bottlenecks and priorities.
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Relevance & Impact:
The Kanban board on Miro provided transparency amongst the team members. It allowed everyone to see what was being worked on, what was completed, and where blockers existed. This improved collaboration, accountability, and focus. It also made stand-up updates easier since progress was visibly trackable at a glance.
Miro Link: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVJY_0SNE=/?share_link_id=331261449754
Project Deliverables - By the Project Manager
The Project Charter outlines the project purpose, scope, milestones, resources, risk and mitigation strategies adopted for the project amongst others before execution begins. It serves as the official “go-ahead” and defines why the project exists.
Relevance & Impact:
The charter set the foundation for the Sip Split project, aligning all team members on a shared vision and ensuring clarity on objectives and expectations. It helped stakeholders understand why the project mattered, what it aimed to achieve, and how success would be measured. Having this clarity from the start minimized confusion and guided decision-making throughout development of the project.
Lessons Learned:
Strengthened my ability to structure and initiate projects from the ground up.
Improved my documentation and communication skills by translating abstract goals into measurable deliverables.
Understood the importance of clarity and stakeholder buy-in during the initiation phase.
Miro Link: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVJYa7LKk=/?share_link_id=439431480879
Project Charter
Project Deliverables - By the Project Manager
Timeline balance
The Timeline balance refers to the project schedule to ensure all tasks are distributed evenly, milestones are feasible and realistic, and tasks are manageable across the team. It’s allowed aligning deliverables with time constraints.
Relevance & Impact:
Balancing the timeline helped maintain project momentum despite different time zones and schedules. It ensured key milestones, such as requirement elicitation, prototype design, test case drafting, and deployment, were achieved without burnout or delays. The ability to spot and remove blockers as needed was made possible because of a clear timeline balance.
What it entails:
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Establishing clear milestones
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Monitoring task progress against planned dates.
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Adjusting priorities or dependencies as needed.
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Ensuring no team role (e.g., QA or Dev) is overloaded.
Project Deliverables - By the Product Owner
Product Canvas
The Product Canvas is a strategic visualization tool that connects the business goals, user needs, and product features in one place. It bridges the gap between high-level vision and practical execution, helping teams align on what to build and why.
What it entails:
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Vision and Goals: Defines the purpose of the Sip Split app — to make group bill splitting easy, fair, and transparent.
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Target Users: Identifies users such as friends dining together, shared renters, or coworkers.
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User Needs: Clarifies pain points like confusion over payment amounts or difficulty tracking who owes what.
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Key Features: Highlights MVP features (bill entry, split calculation, summary view) and future enhancements (tip calculator, itemized split, and payment integrations).
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Metrics for Success: Specifies what success looks like — e.g., smooth user experience, accurate calculations, and stakeholder satisfaction.
Relevance & Impact:
The Product Canvas kept the team’s focus anchored on value delivery rather than just technical outputs. It served as a blueprint for decision-making during design, backlog prioritization, and testing. By visualizing the user journey and linking it to business objectives, it ensured every feature built in the MVP directly supported user satisfaction and the project’s success criteria.
Miro Link: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVJYa7LIQ=/?share_link_id=958710096010
Project Deliverables - By the Product Owner
Product/Decision Backlog
The Product Backlog is a dynamic, prioritized list of all features, enhancements, and fixes that was referred to meet the project’s objectives. It represents the single source of truth for what the team worked on and planning next.
What it entails:
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User Stories: Clear, structured descriptions of user needs (e.g., “As a user, I want to enter the total bill and number of people so I can see how much each person owes.”).
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Acceptance Criteria: Defines what must be true for a story to be considered “done.”
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Prioritization: Organized from high-priority MVP tasks to lower-priority or future enhancements.
Project Deliverables - By the Business Analyst
PRD Structure & Details
I created the PRD after week 1. We had an internal team review on deliverables and expectations for the project.
The project deliverables were gradually compiled on the PRD and we reviewed it as a team atleast six (6) times.
Some of those deliverables are
Problem Statement, Objectives, Scope, User Stories, Acceptance Criteria and so on.
The importance of these were to ensure that when we were designing, we stayed within the scope.
Lessons Learned
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I had first hand experience in creating a PRD and it got a very good feedback.
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I learned how important the PRD was to each member of the team as it ensured we stayed within scope.
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I also learned about the importance of constant documentation and refinement in real time to ensure that my team and I collaborated efficiently with each other.
Project Deliverables - By the Business Analyst
Requirements Gathering
This is one of the most exciting areas for me on the project because it allowed my team and me to run amazing ideas on how we envision the product. We started with a traditional brainstorming session and ended up with round robin for more tailored requirements on the project.
What my focus here for the requirement gathering was we started filtering what our MVP would be based on the feedback of our developer, and we documented this too.
Additional notes are technical notes and wireframe/mockups.
Find out more on our future requirements and MVP requirements gathered:
Miro Link - https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVJPR5lC0=/?share_link_id=694086968086
After requirements had been gathered on what our expectations were for the webpage, we also had a review of our problem statement, scope objectives, etc., for our webpage, and it gave us some open ideas into the end-to-end handling process of the use case of SIP SPLIT.
Use Case Diagram
Find out more - Miro Link: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVJStFG60=/?focusWidget=3458764643627492837
Lessons Learned
No new knowledge was acquired here but I was able to showcase my knowledge on workflows.
Project Deliverables - By the Business Analyst
MVP (User Story & Acceptance Criteria)
After we had gathered our requirement as a team, we worked to get Epics, User Story and Acceptance Criteria.
From the first table, you can see our MVP Epics, User Stories, and Acceptance Criteria.
Miro Link: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVJPR5lC0=/?focusWidget=3458764643354038303
Lessons Learnt
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Gave clarity on how test cases were built in a clear and concise way.
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I built my User Story and Acceptance Criteria writing properly and it helped reshape my understanding.
Project Deliverables - By the QA/Tester
Test Case Document: Its Benefit to the Team. The test case document functioned as a centralized reference artifact, significantly
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It creates a shared ‘Source of Truth’ by translating a high-level requirement into a clear step-by-step validation process. This ensured the team had a clear understanding of what was in progress and what had been done.
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These artifacts, covering some edge cases and error conditions, helped the team identify critical bugs that could have been missed, e.g., the assumption that the total amount was being rounded up to 2 decimal places.
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The test case artifact helped to enhance team-wide communication and collaboration by providing a central reference document that is significant for the DevOps team, comprising developers, BAs. PM, PO, UI/UX, and Tester.
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It served as an accessible repository of test scenarios, expected outcomes against actual outcomes, and most importantly, feedback, which was looped back into the development of the Sip Split web application.
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The Test Case Document helped the team to have a shared understanding by reducing miscommunication, which was sometimes the case, i.e., with the introduction of OCR as a COULD have feature rather than a MUST have feature.
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It provided the team with repeatable test steps for validating the functionality of the features as well as a clear and traceable path to the original product requirement.
Project Deliverables - By the QA/Tester
Benefits of Bug Log to the Team.
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This ensures all defect information, severity, date first mentioned, status, and comments are in one place, eliminating duplicity and confusion among the development team.
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The document helps the team prioritize the bugs that MUST or SHOULD, or COULD be released before launch.
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The document helps the team to track the bug life cycle, i.e., from ‘new’ to Assigned’, ‘in progress’, ‘fixed’, to ‘verified’.
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This document benefits the team in such a way that it serves as a single source of truth for all bugs in the projects. New team members only have to read through to know where the team is with the issues arising from the bug.
