Yesterday was the last sprint review for the semester and the conclusion of my work on the UpdateGuest project (at least as required for my software development capstone course).

During this sprint our team worked on putting the whole UpdateGuest service together.

This sprint I helped to review many of the merge requests associated with my teammates branches and I worked on both making decisions and helping implement the Angular form for our frontend.

Specific issues I worked on this sprint are:

• Reviewing the Angular Testing issue from our last sprint and learning more about this topic.
• Reviewing and adding comments and suggestions for the merge request for the branch that implemented the endpoints in our backend.
• Reviewing a merge request for adding in additional requested endpoints for our backend.
• Creating a discussion for what needed to be tested in our frontend.
• Working on the implementation of the Angular form for the frontend, this included a lot of different merge requests and reviews as we split up the work by component.

I think our team did a really good job this sprint. As Dr. Wurst commented yesterday, our team did really well this sprint with communicating and looking back at the different issues and merge requests from this sprint, I completely agree. Additionally, I was very impressed and excited about the work we accomplished during Sunday when the team met on Discord and worked together to rapidly implement, review, and merge different features.

I think that some things could have gone better too for our team. This includes improving when we work on our issues and working on issues ahead of deadlines, along with having everyone on the team working on reviewing merge requests.

There are a few areas I think I could improve on personally. This includes improved time management and keeping track of overall project progress. This was almost a problem for our team as we had a very last-minute meeting the day before our sprint review to finish our implementation of the frontend and make it work with the backend. I take responsibility for this and I should have setup a meeting to work on this much earlier than Sunday morning, especially as this was suggested by my teammates earlier in the week. Another area I want to improve on is consistently working on issues. This sprint there was a week where I didn’t do any of the work I needed to do for the project and that undoubtedly didn’t help, along with also waiting too long to work on issues. Finally, another issue I would like to improve on is finding a balance between reviewing others’ work and working on my own implementations. This sprint in particular I found that I spent a lot of time reviewing and learning about my teammates work. While I do think this was helpful and led to more refined code getting merged, I think it led to me spending much less time on my own implementations, which I am not as happy about.

Some of the areas I think our team could improve on if we were to continue working together largely relate to some of the issues I could personally improve on. I think both personally and as a team we could further improve on our ability to refine issues and improve on how we estimate the weights for issues. This problem specifically occurred with the implementation of the Angular form where I think it took a lot more time and had more issues than we originally anticipated. Additionally, I think our team could improve on keeping track of overall project progress for meeting deadlines and maybe work towards setting estimated deadlines in all issues with times and dates for issues to be completed. Again, this would help to avoid a last-minute meeting where a lot of work needs to be done in a single day to finish features (or the project). Finally, I think that everyone in our team could work on reviewing more merge requests so that this work is more evenly split and gives others (including me) time to work on their own features.

Overall, I am very happy with the progress our team made during this final sprint and I am especially impressed with how everyone worked together Sunday to finish all of the features we needed for this project to be in a good and working state.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Chris' Computer Science Blog by cradkowski and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This week concluded the second sprint with my work on the UpdateGuest team developing for LibreFoodPantry. This sprint was exciting as we began creating the implementation of our service.

One of the first issues I helped work on this sprint was coming up with questions for the Thea’s Pantry staff member for when they came to our class.

During this sprint our team also focused on improving working together as a team as were beginning to implement our service.

An issue directly related to this included standardizing our IDEs as we prepared to code together on this project.

Secondly, as part of learning to code as a team I also re-read the first five chapters of Clean Code by Robert C. Martin to review best coding practices.

Additionally during this sprint I helped to implement the web interface for our frontend service where I began to learn how to use Angular again and also learned how to use Angular Material. This issue has two merge requests associated with it, one mainly adding Angular Material to the project, and another adding the implementation of the Web UI.

During this sprint I also reviewed and commented on two different merge requests. The first merge request was for implementing MongoDb for our backend service. The second was for the front end architecture document.

Individually, I think I am getting better at becoming a Scrum Master and learning to listen to other people during our meetings as I help to facilitate them. Although I have found it harder to do this when we switched to online meetings as sometimes it is harder to hear people talk than in-person. During the final sprint I would still like to improve on my ability to listen to other people’s suggestions, both during meetings and on GitLab.

I do think I need to get better at being patient with the rate that changes are made. This issue specifically occurred with a merge request when I directly made changes to a branch without asking first (even though I figured I should) as I thought it would be quicker than submitting another review for it. I do regret doing this as it led to a small conflict. We did resolve this issue and as a team we have made a new working policy that helps address this issue, so each developer only works on their branch individually to help avoid merge conflicts, in addition to helping with this issue.

As a team I think we did good this sprint. We finished several issues early on in the sprint and I am particularly happy with the work that was accomplished for the backend service and the web UI. I think that our team was also better at communicating this sprint and that we have improved our communication on issues and our use of GitLab to coordinate and communicate with each other. I also think we had some great collaboration this sprint with reviewing each other’s work, discussing and implementing suggestions, and even having multiple people working on the same branch.

I also think there is further room for improvement with our communication over GitLab and in meetings. Improving GitLab communication is especially important since we no longer have face-to-face meetings, and GitLab is where most of the remaining time discussing issues and work will be spent in the upcoming final sprint.

I do wish we were able to finish all of the issues we planned on doing for this sprint, but I understand that given the many different events over the past month that other things just got in the way of this. Part of this issue also has to do with the weights issues were assigned during planning. I personally think I need to improve my weighting estimates for issues as this seemed way off for this sprint. I think this was part of the reason we were unable to finish all of our issues as issues became more involved and took longer than was originally anticipated when planning for the sprint. Additionally, I think as a team we need to break issues into both smaller and more defined tasks, that way the work is more defined and the issue weight can be estimated more clearly. These factors are something I have been trying to take into account for while planning for the last sprint.

Overall, I am looking forward to our upcoming final sprint and I am excited to see if we can finish the UpdateGuest service.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Chris' Computer Science Blog by cradkowski and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

For over the past month I have been working as a member of the UpdateGuest team as part of developing for the LibreFoodPantry community. This blog post is a retrospective for the first sprint our team had. During this first sprint our team focused on setting up the UpdateGuest service and beginning the research into the tools we want to use to implement this service.

The issues that I was assigned to work on for this first sprint mostly focused on figuring out what we needed from other teams for the UpdateGuest service to function and what information the UpdateGuest service needs to store and to provide for other services under the VisitModule.

Specifically looking at the work I did this sprint:

The first issue I worked on was determining what data fields UpdateGuest would store, this was relatively simple and we decided that our service would mostly be using the fields the RegisterGuest team was storing since our service pulls guest data from theirs.

The second issue I worked on was a quick one creating a .gitignore file for one of our projects.

The third issue I worked on was determining the endpoints UpdateGuest needed from RegisterGuest to be able to get data from their service, this was solved quickly as the RegisterGuest team posted an issue where they listed all of the endpoints their service would have and this was all we needed.

The last issue I solved was what endpoints UpdateGuest needed to create for other services to use (along with our own), this became a discussion on many things, mostly with our team and the RegisterGuest team, to coordinate the endpoints and data they needed from us and how to format the endpoints and the data we are sending back and forth, but also how our service functions in general.

Finally, I helped to discuss and merge the creation of the Angular app for the UpdateGuestWebUI project.

I think that during this first sprint that our team did well. We successfully completed nearly all of the issues that we initially proposed to work on at the beginning of the sprint and even managed to create a couple of new ones and pull some additional issues from the backlog that were completed. Our pacing and completion of issues was mostly on track with the weighting system we used when creating the issues during sprint planning, although this might need some refining. We had good meetings in class where we all talked about what we were working on and we resolved any issues or questions that were ongoing with our work. We also used GitLab effectively to coordinate all of this work and document the different discussions and work as it was ongoing throughout the sprint.

I think that some things could be improved. I think that we could all try talking and communicating a bit more both in-class during our sprint meetings and outside of class either on issues on GitLab or on Discord. From Dr. Wurst’s suggestion I think we should establish some working policies for the rest of the semester’s sprints, especially about communication, but also when work should be done on the project. I think this is necessary so that others have time to contribute and interact on other group member’s issues and work before class meetings, so we are better prepared to discuss them in-class. I think specifically we need to define a team policy of replying to comments on GitLab or Discord when someone directly mentions an individual or the whole team asking for input that helps to solve or facilitate an issue.

Individually I think that I need to improve on my own communication skills and in helping facilitating team meetings in-class. Most importantly, I think that I need to get better at letting others talk and understanding the points they are making, especially if their opinions or solutions differ from my own, before I comment on them. Additionally, I think I need to get better at articulating my explanations of solutions and trying to not sound condescending while doing this. I also think that I could improve on my response time when directly mentioned on GitLab on issues.

Overall, I am excited to be working on a LibreFoodPantry project again and look forward to the remaining sprints as we continue developing our services this semester.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Chris' Computer Science Blog by cradkowski and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.