
During our second sprint for the InventorySystem project, we focused primarily on getting basic “skeleton” systems in-place. By this I mean that we tried to get simpler versions of each of our components working so that they could be used as a baseline for future development. The frontend, backend, database and IAM (Identity & Access Management) systems were focused on primarily throughout this period of work.
I would say that we likely had a proper amount of work planned for development, during this sprint our team was actually bigger, so it was a great help to have more people around to work on development tasks. Because of the larger team, we were able to split-off and each focus on a specific area of the project more effectively.
Two people focused on the frontend (one person worked on one of three necessary frontends each) since there was the project requires multiple front-end interfaces to function. One person focused on the IAM system specifically, and one person focused on the backend system initially. As the sprint progressed, everyone generally was able to complete the majority of necessary tasks, and the project went from having lots of documentation with little working code/examples to having a collection of basic interfaces and systems.
One difficulty I faced specifically was in trying to decide on the appearance & layout of the frontend I worked on during the sprint. Because the preexisting site for the food pantry exists only as a page on the main WSU website, I didn’t have much to go off-of for design besides the general color choices and logo design provided by the university. Something which I found helpful was to organize a meeting with the other teams working on the project, and to ask some questions regarding their process and design choices for their own front-ends. Additionally I was able to get some good advice and feedback from others on my own team based on the development of their frontend components for the project.
I think that having more team members definitely helped our team to be more productive, the process of “splitting-up” tasks worked a lot better this time around because of it. Previously the idea of each person “specializing” seemed harder to achieve, as despite the benefits of distributing the work, there were less people overall, and focusing on one thing meant that other areas would lose out on development focus. Now having a bigger team we were able to use this to our advantage and distribute work more effectively throughout the sprint.
In terms of communication, we used GitLab throughout this sprint to coordinate our efforts, and it seemed like everyone was more used to the process of creating issues and communicating concerns/ideas regarding those issues throughout development. Here: https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/theas-pantry/inventorysystem/community/-/issues/36 is one of the issues I worked on, and generally I tried to include things like screenshots of the work I was doing, links to the repository for any code or examples I had worked on, and descriptions included in the comments regarding the process and anything I might have concerns about. Other team members used Gitlab similarly, posting links to relevant resources which could be helpful to others, linking to their work/posting screenshots and describing any difficulties or issues they ran into. Overall I think it has been an excellent tool for organizing our work for the project, as a place to discuss problems related to it, and as a major source of reference.
Conclusively, I think that this sprint went well, and we were able to get some good progress in over the course of ~5 weeks or so. The increase in the size of our team, being used to the process of using Gitlab for coordination, and overall focus on creating “useable” mock-up and skeleton framework code seemed to allow for increased productivity during the sprint.
From the blog CS@Worcester – CodeRoad by toomeymatt1515 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.