This week, the first sprint has concluded! And boy, there was a lot to learn and improve upon. For one, within my group, I was the Scrum Master, and it is a bit harder than I anticipated. I had some ideas to organize coming into it already, but sometimes, ideas don’t always meet with reality. At times, things were really effortless, and at others, they were rather difficult.
Some things that worked really well, was the overall organization. As a group, I realized that we were all heading into unknown waters, working with a code base that, though we had some idea of, in reality, we truly had no idea how much of it worked. Because of this uncertainty in many areas, I knew it was crucial to try and share our knowledge with each other as the sprint progressed. Some of the biggest boons, and though it was a bit of luck as well, was splitting our different members into the different portions of our issues.
As an example, we had a cluster of issues in our frontend, backend, and API that dealt with the same thing. Essentially, we had to update/add lots documentation, licenses, etc! This looked very simple at first, but there was some difficulty with clarity, since we simply weren’t familiar with what the specs were. We split three of our members into the three issues, and as we worked on the issues, I made a effort to make sure everyone is keeping each other updated, and this allowed us to realize that despite it being the same issue, we were actually doing things differently from one another. This allowed us to quickly establish what we should do as a group, and from there, we were able to progress forward without additional confusion.
Although things did work well because of our constant sharing of what we learned, not everything went smoothly. Some things that I tried to do as Scrum Master was make sure my group was not overly pressured or crunched for time. In my initial thoughts, I figured that we would have enough ‘brawn’ to sort out the issues with some commitment, and knowing how stressful a time crunch can be, I was very, very lax at times when important issues were being resolved. This relaxed attitude helped with the team morale, but it also did not do much to help with the issues and even stalled some issues. Moving forward, I hope to strike a balance between calming the team when things are not coming to a close, and trying to nudge them forward more when the deadlines are approaching.
As a team, I genuinely believe that we did very well. The biggest flaw in our teamwork, was not actually when we collaborated, but some team members doing things on their own, but these were only very minor issues such as changing issue names without telling anyone, which caused some confusion, as well as encountering a problem and trying to fix it without telling any other group members. Both instances, were very minor at best, and as soon as they were noticed, were stamped out already. Specifically, we know that moving forward, all group members need to try to communicate problems with the team before silently fixing them, and if a issue needs a new name, the new name needs to properly describe what the issue is.
Individually as well, I believe that I was very caught up with making sure that the team functioned, and though that was a great thing, it also negatively impacted my performance as an individual. I oversaw much of the progress, and was kept updated on how various systems worked, so I believe I have a good understanding of how the project works, but I have very little real work to show for it. Moving forward, despite being the Scrum Master, I have to not only manage the group and keep an eye on things, but also use my own abilities to push things forward.
Updating Dev container files
Updating/adding Documentation, licensing, etc
Finally, as much as there was lacking, I believe that moving forward, things will be much smoother. Our group has many great developers, and this was our first time doing a sprint. I already have many ideas on how to improve, and though it might be a bit of trial and error at times, we as a team, have all the ability to clear out our issues!
From the blog CS@Worcester – Bored Coding by iisbor and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.