During the second sprint of my software development capstone class, it had a very unique feel to it for various reasons. One of the reasons on why it had a unique feel to it is because my team and I had to create some of our own side tasks in addition to the ones that we were assigned. Considering that this is the second sprint, it didn’t contain that many tasks to do besides getting use to some new applications that were introduced such as Balsamiq which is a nice tool provided by AMPATH.
What I learned in this week’s sprint was learning how to use Balsamiq, learned the fundamentals on how an offline module works, and learned how to map the node paths to understand how the AMPATH server communicates to a router module to fetch patient data. Learning how to map the node paths from the AMPATH code was one of the side tasks that I my team and I wanted to do because we felt that it would put the team as well as the rest of the class in a good position to prepare for what could come next in the upcoming sprints. Keeping that in mind, I think that this portion of work that my team and I are doing can benefit the other teams in the class because the ideas or information that my team and I come up with might be useful to other teams and vice-versa. Looking back on how I’ve learned these things with my team, I think I did a great job and I don’t see anyway to approach this differently.
The team performance was good and the CATME Team Evaluation in my opinion was accurate. Everyone in the group participated in all the tasks that were assigned for them to do. My performance fell under the category of completing a fair share of work, if not a little more. I assigned my personal task to be making sure that the team trello board was up to date on what tasks each person should be doing. That will be my personal task moving forward with the upcoming sprints in addition to other tasks assigned to me. As far as it goes for my teammates, they all did well. Rick and Jason contributed heavily in trying to understand the node paths in the AMPATH code. Jeremiah reminded the group to not forget to do the standups that we needed to do on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Everyone contributed to the work fairly and I think we established an organized way to keep track on what person is doing, and making sure that they are doing something. I don’t we could’ve approached this differently.
The tasks the got done was reading the user stories for offline modules, and checking out the node paths. The one thing that I would consider that didn’t get done was figuring out the node paths. Although my teammates and I did find how the server communicates and we also got a brief idea on how it talks to the router module, I would consider this task an ongoing or work in progress. The steps that we took to approach this task was that first, we tried to search for patients, but no data returned to us. So that made us think that there might be a connection issue to the routing server in the code. In order to test that theory, we tried to locate the router module in the code, and from that point we made that our task in understanding how the communication between server and router module worked to fetch the data within a database provided by AMPATH. We succeeded in getting ideas from dissecting the code and drew a path diagram in Balsamiq on how might the communication takes place. I would say that we failed in a sense that we couldn’t fully figure how it actually communicates within the time given in this sprint. We chose this course of action by trying to fetch patient data.
Overall, the team and I were satisfied with this sprint. One thing that improved from the last sprint was communication between team members. Everyone knew what to do and everyone knew what each person was doing which promoted quality work.
From the blog CS@Worcester – Ricky Phan by Ricky Phan CS Worcester and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.
