For our first sprint, our goal was to familiarize ourselves with the different components of a system that we need to work with and that we don’t know. Most of the issues present in our first sprint dealt with researching these aforementioned components, for instance, RabbitMQ, EKS, and Kubernetes. As such, most of our issues were researching the anatomy of what we’d be working with via AWS EKS. I believe our main difficulty was determining what we needed to research, and what was useful or not.
To get what did not work best out of the way first, some team members, myself included, missed the deadline on some of the issues. In my case, this was due to the fact that we are unfamiliar with much of what we’re researching, thus, the issue I dealt that I’m referencing with was denser than I expected it to be because it’s difficult to project precisely how long each issue would take, or if we need to split it up into several smaller issues1.
What worked well was our team’s communication with each other in class, and in some of the issues. It took a few classes to warm up to each other. I think the descriptions and how we formatted our research also worked well. In general, we used markdown to break down our research into more digestible sections that made it easier to understand2. Another thing I thought worked well was the description of what we may be looking for in the issue descriptions. While difficult to be too specific, it helped as a starting point for the other team members to begin once they finally started on the issue3.
As an individual, I think I could improve on meeting issue deadlines in a more timely manner. While I mentioned earlier that the issue was denser than I thought it would be, I also should’ve managed my time better, and started working on this earlier to fully understand the time it would take, so that I might’ve been able to mention it in the next class. I also think that I should’ve talked more through the GitLab Issues / Epics rather than other means. While I did communicate using the aforementioned means, it may be better to discuss more, especially as our future sprints will more than likely demand it.
As a team, I think we should institute a better application of rules throughout the issues. While writing this, I realized the issues implement markdown format differently than others4 5. I don’t think this is a big deal, but it may be better to implement some form of standard across the issues. I also think that we may need to communicate a little more via the GitLab Issues / Epics. In this first sprint, most of the issues were independent research that usually didn’t cross over into other issues very much, hence there was little need for communication between team members. However, given that the second and third sprints will involve deployment, it is both required and vital that we communicate on GitLab.
Evidence:
- https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/common-services/aws-deployment/general/-/issues/13#note_848604859 – A note left by me explaining why it took extra time.
- https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/common-services/aws-deployment/general/-/issues/14 – An example of research using markdown to partition the different parts of research as mentioned above.
- https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/common-services/aws-deployment/general/-/issues/4 – Example of an issue’s description that includes a brief description and several points of interest.
- https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/common-services/aws-deployment/general/-/issues/11 – An issue description using spacing to separate sections.
5. https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/common-services/aws-deployment/general/-/issues/15 – An issue using titles in markdown to separate sections.
From the blog CS@Worcester – Chris's CS Blog by Chris and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.