Category Archives: Sprint-1

Looking Back on Sprint 1

The first sprint contained a lot of small tasks for setting up the environment and getting familiar with the ng2-amrs system. While some of these tasks were simple, others that originally seemed simple became difficult and took more time than the team and I originally expected. Overall, I feel that the team worked well together and that we were able to complete the bulk of the story items for this sprint. There were a few areas where I think we could improve for the next sprint, and these topics were discussed during our retrospective meeting in class.

One of the first tasks that was completed for the sprint was to Create a GitHub organization for your team. Dominique assigned herself to this task, and created the organization. She invited all of the other team members to the organization during a class work day and ensured that we were all able to access the organization.

Another task that was completed quickly due to its relative simplicity was the Choose a label color for your team. Matt assigned himself to this task and changed the label color on the appropriate card on the Class Scrum Board.

I assigned myself to the Fork ‘ng2-amrs’ from CS-Worcester-CS-448-SP-2018 to your organization task. I was able to complete this task only because Dominique had already created an organization for our team and gave me the necessary permissions.

The Read README.md and Read CONTRIBUTING.md tasks were relatively simple, and all members of the team completed these tasks early in the sprint.

The Decide how you want to manage your team’s GitHub repository was completed as a class rather than as a team, so little effort was required on the part of our team.

Everyone on the team was able to complete the Clone ng2-amrs to your computer task, as Dominique gave all of the members of the team access to the organization’s fork of the project.

Some of the tasks that gave the team a little more difficulty were the Learn how tests work for Angular, Build ng2-amrs on your computer, and Connect your ng2-amrs to the server. While the team members that had the project built and connected to the server attempted to help other team members get up and running, there were a few different and unique problems that gave people trouble in building and connecting ng2-amrs to the server.

Matt was able to fix one of the most severe of these problems, namely that of the ladda module complaining about missing files. Matt shared his solution with the team and the rest of the class, and was able to help many people in successfully building the project.

We were initially waiting on the Ampath Informatics team to provide us with a link to a server that we could connect to. When this link was provided midway through the sprint, we chose to add the task to our sprint backlog as some members of the team were ready to accept more tasks. For this reason, it was not a concern that the entire team was unable to complete this task.

The final task that was not completed by everyone in the team was to learn about tests in Angular. Once again, this task was not of critical concern because we likely won’t be using testing heavily early on in the development process.

I think that the team worked well together, and that members supported one another throughout the sprint. One thing that we may be able to improve upon is communicating when we are having difficulty so that others are able to offer assistance. Or, on the flip side, asking and offering assistance when another member of the team seems to be struggling. I am looking forward to working with my team and getting into some of the more technical parts of the Ampath project.

From the blog CS@Worcester – ~/GeorgeMatthew/etc by gmatthew and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

CS448 Sprint 1 Retrospective

Overall, I felt that this sprint went pretty well. Being the first sprint, I understood that there was going to be a bit of a learning curve and I felt that the team took to the Agile process well. One of the best decisions we have made so far was to create our own task board for our team. By doing so, it made it much easier to keep track of what was done and what needed to be done. For the tasks that each team member had to do, we put a checklist with our names so it was easy to keep track of who still had work to do. The team did a good job for the most part keeping the board up to date. It is important to keep track of what has been done to prevent duplicate work from being done so I was happy that the board was updated regularly. Overall, I felt that our team communication could have been better and would have allow us to resolve some team member’s problems faster, but better communication is something I think will come in time. The team should discuss as a group what the standard for communication should be so we are all on the same page.

I feel that the biggest accomplishment this week was getting the ng2-amrs compiled and connected to the server. I know several teammates were able to do this and hopefully we will be able to get the others running shortly. The challenge behind getting ng2-amrs was it would not build in it’s “out of the box” state. The issue had to do with the ladda module, which was responsible for some of the styling I believe. It was looking for files in the wrong location and some directory paths in the files were formatted incorrectly. It was a bit of a process, but I was able to resolve these issues and get it to build. The solution to this issue can be found on the CS448 Slack page. Oren took my original instructions and improved upon them (so his instructions are the one’s you’ll want to use), which can also be found on the same Slack page.

Although getting ng2-amrs was the biggest accomplishment of the week, a lot of other things got done as well. Everyone on the team able to get to all of the readings done which were both essential and informative. All of the team tasks (as in the ones that the team had to complete as a unit rather than everyone individually) got done. Everyone was also able to clone ng2-amrs and start building. Those who were unable to get ng2-amrs built and running are well on their way to doing so.

I feel this team works well together and am looking forward to the continued work with this group throughout the semester. It will be nice to actually start digging into the real work next sprint rather than a lot of set-up type tasks we had to do this sprint. Hopefully we will be able to help out the folks at AMPATH in some way, shape, or form.

 

From the blog CS@Worcester – README by Matthew Foley and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.