I think that the first sprint went well overall. My teammates and I completed all of the issues we assigned ourselves during the planning meeting, so the sprint was definitely a success. We accomplished this thanks to our effective use of the GitLab issue board. For the most part, our issues were clearly defined by their titles and labels, which helped us understand what needed to be done. Additionally, we assigned different team members to different issues, which made it easy to track our own issues and the progress of each other. The issue board also helped guide our in-class discussions, as the column-based structure allowed us to quickly select doing issues to discuss their progress and evaluate the needs review issues as a group before moving them to done. Finally, the board gave us a platform for discussion outside of class with each other and with other teams. We successfully used this to clarify what we needed from other teams and to answer questions among ourselves.
I think the main issue among the team during this sprint was communication. We did not always keep each other informed about our individual tasks, which sometimes made it difficult to resolve problems. During our class sessions, discussions frequently came to a stop after we reviewed our issues, leading us to silently work separately instead of collaborating. One major hinderance to our progress was an issue with our .gitignore file in the UpdateGuestWebUI repository. We had a branch where a mock Angular app was created, which had commits made before we finalized the .gitignore on the master branch. This caused unnecessary files to be committed, and we spent multiple weeks trying to find a way to remove them. We eventually found a simple solution that involved removing and recommitting every file after updating the .gitingore. It really shouldn’t have taken us that long to find such a simple solution, and I think we could have solved the problem quickly if we all worked together on it rather than focusing on our assigned issues independently.
I think there are several changes that can be made for future sprints, both for me individually and for the team as a whole. For myself, I think I could leave more comments on issues. I often made progress on my assigned issues or wanted to ask questions to my teammates, but I decided to wait until our class meetings to inform them about my progress and ask them my questions. Not only did this result in several of my contributions being undocumented on GitLab, but I also felt that it slowed the pace at which I could work. I also think that I need to work on communicating with the team in class more. During our meetings, I need to try listening better and making more contributions during discussions so that I can keep myself informed about the team’s progress and help my teammates resolve their problems more efficiently.
For the team as a whole, I think we can make some improvements to our usage of the GitLab issue board. I think we used it effectively overall, but there were some problems that caused confusion, such as an issue getting duplicated. We also exclusively used template descriptions for our issues, which sometimes made it unclear what we planned to do. I think we could better coordinate how we create and label our issues to avoid such confusion in the future. Additionally, I think the team could make improvements to communication. Instead of simply sitting in silence during class, we could explain to each other what we are working on in order to keep each other informed. Also, asking questions about issues and listening closely to comments from each other would undoubtedly help us avoid drawing problems out for too long. While this sprint was certainly an overall success, making these changes would help us work more efficiently and ultimately complete more of the project.
Links to My GitLab Contributions:
These are issues I was assigned to, where I made comments detailing my progress.
- https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/modules/visitmodule-tp/updateguest/Plan/issues/6
- https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/modules/visitmodule-tp/updateguest/Plan/issues/5
- https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/modules/visitmodule-tp/updateguest/UpdateGuestWebUI/issues/1
These are issues where I replied to comments from a teammate, acknowledging that their progress would help me with my assigned issues.
- https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/modules/visitmodule-tp/updateguest/Plan/issues/16
- https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/modules/visitmodule-tp/updateguest/Plan/issues/11
These are issues I opened, assigned weights and labels, and edited the descriptions of.
- https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/modules/visitmodule-tp/updateguest/Plan/issues/6
- https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/modules/visitmodule-tp/updateguest/Plan/issues/7
- https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/modules/visitmodule-tp/updateguest/Plan/issues/16
- https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/modules/visitmodule-tp/updateguest/UpdateGuestWebUI/issues/1
These are issues I moved across the board.
- https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/modules/visitmodule-tp/updateguest/Plan/issues/6
- https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/modules/visitmodule-tp/updateguest/Plan/issues/16
- https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/modules/visitmodule-tp/updateguest/UpdateGuestWebUI/issues/3
- https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/modules/visitmodule-tp/updateguest/UpdateGuestWebUI/issues/1
- https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/modules/visitmodule-tp/updateguest/Plan/issues/11
- https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/modules/visitmodule-tp/updateguest/Plan/issues/5
This is the duplicate issue that I closed.
This is the UpdateGuestWebUI repository I created and worked in. Note that the branch where I added the .gitignore and the Angular Mock branch where I resolved the .gitignore issue have since been merged into master.
From the blog CS@Worcester – Computer Science with Kyle Q by kylequad and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.