During the first Sprint of this semester, I worked on adding a new field to the Guest object that records the date of the first visit to the pantry in the backend of the system. While working on this issue, me and one of my teammates named Hiercine, decided that it would be better for us to work on our issues together as she was supposed to implement it in the API.
We had a few issues in the beginning of our Sprint, but these issues were later resolved. Some of the issues we had included being confused on what some of our issues were, and not communicating to our teammates when we needed help. Also, we had people working on similar issues but not working together.
While we had a couple things that didn’t work well, we managed to improve upon them and had things that did work well. At the beginning of the Sprint, we divided the issues based on what each person was most comfortable and confident working on. We realized that it was a lot easier for us to work in pairs, so we started to do that with our issues. This made us complete them a lot faster as well as have another set of eyes when one of us was confused on what to do next. Similarly, we asked each other how we were doing on our issues every class and helped where it was needed.
I can’t think of any changes we can make to improve upon as a team except for maybe communicating more outside of class, but that hasn’t been needed as of yet.
As an individual, I can improve by speaking up more. This includes talking about my ideas, my problems, and checking in on others. I tend to be a quiet person, and it would be helpful for both me and my team if I spoke up more.
A pattern from the Apprenticeship Patterns book that is relevant to my experience during this Spring is the “Rubbing Elbows” pattern. This pattern is about learning by working closely with others. When you spend time coding, discussing, and solving problems with teammates, you pick up new skills and ideas faster. Instead of struggling alone, you get to see how others work, ask questions, and get help when needed. It encourages developers to actively seek out collaboration because working side by side makes learning easier and improves teamwork. I picked this pattern because it relates with how me and Hiercine worked together on related tasks. I had issues at first, but after collaborating with her, I was able to improve. If I had read about this pattern before the first sprint, I would have been more into working with teammates.
Overall, I think this Sprint went very well and our future Sprints will go even better.
Here are links to some of the work we did, as well as a description for each:
This link is to the merge request for all of the work we did during this issue, adding the new field to the API and the rest of the backend. https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/theas-pantry/guestinfosystem/guestinfobackend/-/merge_requests/111/commits
This link shows the commit for adding the schema to the openapi file, as well as creating the new field within the backend of the file itself. https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/theas-pantry/guestinfosystem/guestinfobackend/-/merge_requests/111/diffs?commit_id=570a34899a7e81af0dc97024016f1ca60aef035f
This link shows the commit where we fixed the tests so that they didn’t include the first visit date of the guest, so that the tests would pass. https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/theas-pantry/guestinfosystem/guestinfobackend/-/merge_requests/111/diffs?commit_id=575da5d7eb01d0752a5c825bccbd996f7a9939f0
From the blog CS@Worcester – One pixel at a time by gizmo10203 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.