What Worked Well And What Didn’t:
After completing our first sprint and conducting our retrospective meeting, I would say that sprint #1 went really well. As a group, we were given three weeks to complete a total of thirteen different tasks for a total weight of 25, and only fell short of one for a total weight of 20 out of 25. What worked well with the team was that we all knew each other, allowing us to be comfortable with asking different questions or for assistance. Additionally, we were able to schedule weekly meetings whether virtually through Discord or in person. These meetings allowed everyone to be informed about project progress, issues, and next steps. Communication was a major successor for this sprint, further accelerating our knowledge within the project. For what didn’t work well, our timing of working on the project was slightly off. We gradually contributed but didn’t get the ball moving until the end of our sprint. I could understand this as some of us were unfamiliar with the functionality of GitLab and GitPod, and what was completed in the project. For the next sprint, working on the project little by little right when we start and understanding what we are dealing with, will provide us time to discover issues, figure out how to handle them, and complete our tasks in a timely fashion. Additionally, we should consider having a better review process to ensure everyone gets to review work.
Improvements As A Team:
To improve as a team, it would be great to further improve our communication. On days that we don’t have scheduled meetings, possibly posting an update on what everyone is currently completing, any problems they have, if someone needs something reviewed, and if they need help from another person on the team that may have knowledge on what they are working on could be beneficial. Also I believe we should begin working on our issues from the start rather than stressing and cramming everything all at once at the end of the sprint. We should also implement a better reviewing process.
Improvements As An Individual:
As someone who had just stepped into the project, I was unfamiliar with navigating through GitLab to find different things, what was completed within the project, and what needs to be worked on. After researching different things and searching through various repositories, I was able to figure this out. I was able to complete three issues individually and one issue as a group particularly working within the InventorySystem of the Theas Pantry project. My first issue was GitPod Dev Environment in InventorySystem/General. This involved having the Theas Pantry project work with VSCode in GitPod, rather than devcontainers. The second issue I completed was also GitPod Dev Environment in InventorySystem/InventoryAPI. I completed the same work to have VSCode work in GitPod rather than in devcontainers. My third issue was Move From ‘commands’ to ‘bin’ in InventorySystem/InventoryBackend. This issue involved changing the file name from commands to bin, updating all script paths to use bin, and ensuring pipeline stages like build, test, and release all functioned properly. I ran into an issue with the test pipeline for this specific task as files were missing. To correct this, I had to disable the test pipeline and plan on fixing this in the next sprint. The last issue I worked on was with my group, GitPod Dev Environment in InventorySystem/Documentation. We completed the same work to have VSCode work in GitPod rather than in devcontainers. To improve as an individual in future sprints, I would like to complete a little bit of work each day, rather than trying to just complete as much as I possibly can all at once. I spent a lot of time working on my issues and when something didn’t work, I’d burn myself out trying to figure out what the problem was. In future sprints, completing issues piece by piece can allow me to have a fresh mindset each time I work on the project and complete tasks in a faster, more efficient manner. Additionally, by completing a little bit each day, it can take away stress from time constraints and allow me to ask questions, get reviews, make changes, and improve the quality of my work.
From the blog CS@Worcester – Conner Moniz Blog by connermoniz1 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.