This last sprint I feel as though I went backwards. I am not too happy with my results. I spent the majority of my time working on semantic-release for the backend, frontend, and api branches, which I was only able to partially complete. Reflecting on this sprint, I should have absolutely given up and started work on something else. If I had given up someone else might have tried, and one of my team members might have had a different way of approaching the problem and solved it. If I were to look at this optimistically, its good that I messed up in class rather than in a real job. I was also able to write my findings in the issues I was working on so that the next student to take up the issue won’t be starting from scratch.

When working on the backend and api branches I was getting errors that did not make sense to me. I believe that there is something wrong with the repositories since that should be the only difference between the backend and api. I communicated this in my issue descriptions.

If I had to say something good about myself I really do like my issue descriptions. I am not sure if it will be helpful for the next students, but I really hope it is. I even tried to suggest possible solutions I was thinking of. I knew that I had to try hard to write good documentation because when we inherited this project from the previous group, there was little documentation for us to go off.

Something I think my team could have done better is to check in with each other more often. Sometimes I did not know what my teammates were working on, which is something you never want when working in agile production development. We slacked off on our daily standup meetings; if we didn’t I could have communicated my struggle with semantic-release. We could have made more of an effort to perform out standup meetings correctly, and I know that would have definitely helped me, and probably others as well.

Something that I could have done better relates to communication as well; I could have asked for help. I am not sure why, but throughout my struggles with semantic-release I did not ask my group for help at all. I did ask other people, but if I had gone to my group they would have known about my problem, been thinking about solutions, and they would care about fixing it since it directly relates to them. For whatever reason I kept believing that I could solve it myself since I got it working on the frontend, but now I realize this was a mistake.

I am not going to lie to myself; I did worse this sprint compared to sprint two. I think it is important to look at your own work objectively and critically in order to improve. Like I said before, I am grateful for this learning experience while still in college. I know that an employer will expect me to make mistakes, but I am not the kind of person to be satisfied producing sub-par products. I will do my best to learn from this experience and try to not repeat the same mistakes in the future.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Ryan Blog by rtrembley and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

With the conclusion of our last sprint, I’ll start by reflecting on the team performance. I think we went into this sprint pretty determined to get the backend fully up and running. Those of us who were involved in the backend development started working on trying to get the backend running in order to test each of the endpoints. Though the container was running, we were unable to use http calls to test any of the endpoints. We realized that there was a bigger issue than what we initially thought, resulting in us spending most of the sprint trying to get the backend server running. Another thing I would like to point out was that we had issues that were a bit too ambitious. We structured our sprint around the idea that we were going to have the backend running fairly quickly. And because of this we were essentially unable to do a good amount of issues because they required the backend to be running.

Reflecting back on my performance, I would say that I communicated well with the team at the start of the sprint. I discussed with my team during the sprint planning, helping the team structure what needed to be done for the upcoming sprint. At the beginning of the sprint, I assigned myself issue #31 in the backend, which was to test the removeInventory endpoint. I spent time trying to test with http calls but I was not getting any response. I then learned that we were having issues getting the backend to run, which explains why I was not getting a response. I think when it came to this point, I started becoming unproductive due to the fact that my assigned issue depended on the backend running. 

As a team, we definitely could have improved in the communication aspect. At some points during the sprint it was a bit unclear as to what everyone was working on. Most of our progress came to a halt by the issues with the backend, and I think we should’ve put all hands on deck to look into the issues. I do also think we could’ve come up with more manageable issues. For example, a task such as implementing keycloak into the inventory system is something that we can’t gauge the weight of until we actually start working on it. We could’ve come up with issues to get the backend running as opposed to things to do after the backend is running.

Coming away from this sprint, I will need to remember to communicate with my team, engaging with them to see if they need help with anything. I think I should’ve spent more time looking at the entire structure of the project to get a better understanding of how it should work, that way I can look into issues as to why things aren’t running. I will also need to consider setting realistic goals and understanding what things can be done in certain time frames. I still learned a lot from these past three springs and I look forward to applying this knowledge to my professional career.

issue #31: Troubleshooting the removeInventory.js endpoint which was unsuccessful due to the backend not running as intended.
issue #3: Bundle items-api.0.1.0.yaml to be used in the backend.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Null Pointer by vrotimmy and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The course of our sprint was good, we completed large sections on the frontend and backend from the last sprint to get the necessary functionality to integrate the front end and backend together. We achieved our sprint goals by all agreeing on what was most important to focus on in the sprint, which helped us on completing our ultimate sprint objective. We structured our issues in such a way that they were less dependent on each other for completion. This strategy maximized the number of issues that could be completed without having to wait for someone to submit their issue first.

Keeping in mind the lessons from our previous sprints, we continued to work in small branches dedicated to one issue at a time. There was minimal code divergence because of our fast branch, merge, branch strategy. It was tempting to keep developing in the same branch, but with the small size of our project, the structure of our project changed very quickly. Merging large branches together often resulted in breaking code in the past. By our third sprint, we had developed a great workflow and collaborated seamlessly. Two large braking changes we made this sprint were updating the port numbers for the backend and frontend as well as updating the fields within the guest info record.

With our workflow and communication, our team updated internal ports, mapped them to docker images, and reflected the changes in docker-compose files for code in multiple repositions. All while maintaining integration of the frontend and backend code. We also had to remove and add new fields for the guest record. This required modifying the OpenAPI Schema, handling the changes in the backend, and modifying the form on the frontend. By doing small branches in coordination with our team members, these major changes were made without issue. If this was our first sprint, things would have been more difficult. I see the ease at which we made these major updates as evidence of how much we have developed over the semester.

Overall, there were no significant indefinable changes we should make as a team. As always, we should aim to communicate with each other to the best of our ability. In my opinion, we did this well and left little room for a need to improve. Although our in-team communication was excellent, one area that still needs improvement is our communication between teams. We improved on this compared to the last sprint by working with other teams using the credit card scanner, sharing CSS styling, and meeting with the Kubernetes team to discuss integration. However, we wanted to implement keycloak this sprint, but we did not accomplish that task. The reason for this was both due to running out of time and failing to have enough dialogue with the IAM team to learn how their system would integrate with our system. If we had the fourth sprint, I am sure we would be able to learn from our experience and succeed at implementing these features in the future.

Overall, I improved significantly between sprint one and sprint three. I could still improve the amount of communication I have from team to team and take it upon myself to reach out more. I did do this during sprint three more than I had in the previous sprints, but improvement could be made in the number of times I reached out.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Jared's Development Blog by Jared Moore and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

To start with, our communication got a lot better about when we were done working on things, and about what needed to be done before the rest of us could work on new issues. Our prioritization also improved greatly, with us figuring out what was most vital in order to get our project as far along as we could in the last sprint. Our issues were also a lot clear in terms of what needed to be done, and we were relatively efficient in assigning and working on them as needed. I also felt that personally, I was extremely productive during this sprint, more so than I had been in the others, and this was the first sprint I felt that I had an extremely clear goal and something that was important and useful that I was working on.

That being said, I felt like other parts of team communication were lacking somewhat. We still struggled with knowing what everyone else was working on, and there were a lot of cases where it seemed like some people were finished and waiting on others, or were just unsure of what to do next. I felt like the backend not being fully functional still was a huge holdup to the rest of our work, but there were still some small things that could’ve been done without it. I think that having a clear end date on when we would be able to work on the project left us with less motivation to get some things done, as they would likely have to be redone by future teams, so I just think that our overall planning was a little bit lacking for the amount of work we had to do in some places, as evidenced by our remaining issues in the sprint backlog.

As a team, I think that we should have improved our communication a bit more, and more time spent looking at what actually needed to be done in the code could’ve helped us break up the work a little bit more. But I also think that this largely comes from our lack of clear direction and prioritization in the prior sprints. I think that greater clarity and communication about what we did, what we were working on, and what we needed done could’ve helped avoid a lot of the issues we ran into this sprint, and I think that overall having a clearer picture of the overarching architecture required for all of this could’ve helped us a lot. If we had spent more time getting to know exactly what we had done and what we needed to do could’ve helped us significantly improve our performance in this case.

As an individual, I think that I should’ve been more open about what I was doing with my team, and this sprint has given me an example of how I need to, in the future, pay more attention to the vital parts of the project, so we can get those working before we start working on the meat of it all. I should have been more meticulous previously, and less short-sighted when creating issues. Spending more time looking through the code and what we needed could’ve helped greatly here, I feel.

Issue #36: This started off as just adding bin files to start and build the backend server, but became reconfiguring and rewriting all the server files to get the backend server and API functioning.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Kurt Maiser's Coding Blog by kmaiser and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.