Well here we are – the end of the last full sprint for the spring 2018 semester. Honestly, it is a bit surreal. Everyone in this class has been working towards the goal of an undergraduate degree for the vast majority of their lives and now we are all just weeks away from achieving this goal. It is awesome to see everyone in the class continuing to work hard on this project with Ampath. It would be very easy for us to check out at this point in the semester.
I understand that this retrospective blog is supposed to focus on the current sprint, but seeing how this is the last opportunity I am going to have to write this blog for this class, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on what “The Perfect Name” was able to accomplish this semester. So, please bear with me…
I couldn’t be prouder of what our team was able to accomplish this semester. Our knowledge about the Ampath project, Angular, Typescript, Agile software development, etc. has grown tremendously. We have all come a long way when compared to the beginning of the semester. The learning curve for this project was quite steep and even with that we were still able to produce a demonstrable feature by the end of the semester. Although we may not have accomplished everything we set out to do at the start, we still made great strides towards the ultimate goal and have put whoever takes over the feature in a good spot to complete it. Now, onto a retrospective more focused on this sprint…
As usual, the team work very well together this sprint. No one is afraid to ask question at this point and everyone tries to help out anywhere and everywhere they can. If I’m being honest I would say last sprint was probably a bit more productive than this sprint, but I’d say this was our second most productive sprint of the semester. This sprint we had to take a step back and look at where we stood compared with the goal we had set at the beginning of the semester. During planning we all agreed we weren’t going to totally reach our goal; we did not implement the encryption service and we weren’t able to add the ability to store multiple users. We agreed everything else we had set out to do at the start of the semester would be done by the end of the semester. Because we agreed we weren’t going accomplish everything, we set out this sprint to leave whoever takes over for us in the best position possible. To do this we had two main goals: completely finish any outstanding tasks – we felt it was better to make sure we finished the work we had already started the right way rather than rushing through it to try and make an attempt at the encryption service and/or multiple user storage (it wasn’t realistic to finish either given the time constants), and to thoroughly document what we were able to accomplish so whoever takes over wouldn’t have to waste their time figuring out what was done.
I am happy to report that we were able to accomplish most of the goals I mentioned above this sprint. We created a document explaining what was done, where the code was changed, etc. This document can be found on our team page of the CS448 Slack channel. Hopefully it will be useful to whoever takes over. We are still working on the backend for the offline credential storage checkbox, but we are confident it will be done by the end of the semester. Once the backend is done, all that we will be leaving outstanding is encrypting the password (which will hopefully be simple with the help of the encryption team’s work) and storing multiple users. It was really nice to see ideas actually play out, even if it wasn’t as quite as feature rich as we had originally hopped for. The documentation and backend were the two main goals this sprint, but obviously there were several other smaller things accomplished as well (some research, tests, minor bug fixes, etc).
Lastly, I’d like to thank everyone involved with this project for a great semester. I couldn’t have asked for a better group of people to work with. I know I made some new friends along the way. I hope that was the case for others as well!
From the blog CS@Worcester – README by Matthew Foley and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.