Now that Sprint 1 has come to an end, it is time for the retrospective blog. I will start by including everything I contributed to this sprint:
This link is a note in an issue where I have put a document discussing the Pros and Cons of whether we should be using a relational database or not. I put some examples of relational databases and non-relational databases for when I was making a decision along with links explaining a few of them.
This link is another comment on GitLab basically stating that we are using mySQL because of the simplicity and it is easy to look up information on it if needed.
This is the repository for our database currently, it is currently on a separate branch and not merged with the master due to a sudden change in database fields which will be implemented first thing in the next sprint.
This is another repository that holds the results of completing the Tour of Heroes Angular tutorial. This was the last thing completed for the current sprint to give me a refresher on Angular as I haven’t worked with Angular in a little over a year.
This was our first sprint so everything obviously wasn’t going to be perfect. However, I believe that we used GitLab very well considering this is my first time actually collaborating on a big project using GitLab. I think that we created issues that were specific enough to be considered issues. We utilized the boards well too. Our communication was mainly done through class and text message, but overall, I still think we communicated every issue that needed to be communicated.
Of course there were things that didn’t work well either considering it was the first sprint and this is most of our first experiences with Agile and sprints. While I mentioned that our GitLab use was very good. There were some faults with it as well. For example, my desktop didn’t let me push to GitLab which is an issue that still needs to be resolved. I specifically had trouble working with the separate branches because it was confusing at first. Our issues weren’t created the right way at first, and had to be restarted even though there were ways to just edit them without restarting. We had good communication, but I felt as though I wasn’t as involved as I should have been with the other team members work. I also think that there wasn’t enough communication between the other groups in the class as a whole.
Some of the changes that can be made as a team is more involvement in each others work. I think that we can all spend more class time looking at each others work rather than looking at it on our own time because this allows for more discussion. I also think that our team could start communicating with other teams more. Most of the teams came to us rather than us going over to the other teams to collaborate.
My individual changes that I need to make is talking more to my team members about what they have been working on rather than focusing on my own work. I could offer more solutions to the front end team about design. Probably my biggest issue would be my procrastination. I have to start working on my assignments earlier because that has an effect on how the rest of my team performs. I think that this next sprint will be much better now that we have been exposed to this more.
From the blog CS@Worcester – My Life in Comp Sci by Tyler Rego and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.