During the course of this sprint, I spent most of my time looking at the ReportingBackend repository to figure out what was going wrong with the testing suite. I also had assigned myself to configuring the pipeline specifically in ReportingAPI with the linters, but unfortunately was unable to complete this issue because the team responsible for actually adding the linters to the repository was not able to push their changes before the sprint ended. I continued to act as the scrum master for the team, taking an active approach to making sure everyone is doing work, getting credit for their work, and setting up meetings when necessary. I had to help out a bit with other team member’s issues as well, providing some guidance.
Verify the Testing Suite works: Investigate the testing suite and see if I can get it to work, or at least figure out the magnitude of the problem. I applied a couple of fixes (one of which was in the build.sh script that I had a separate 0 weight issue created for, as I had already found the bug and fix prior to the sprint starting.), but it seems like the issue transcends the testing suite and is moreso an issue with the build process with the server.
This sprint was pretty rough, if I’m being honest. For what we did well, our communication overall improved, and the team was better able to utilize GitLab for their work. I think that everything on GitLab was better organized and most of the issues had better descriptions on them than what we had last sprint, and the weight assigned to issues seemed fairly accurate all things considered, aside from the testing issue (which I did spend a lot of time on). We also did work with each other more than we did on the last sprint.
Most of the issues that were assigned to our team were rushed together during the last week of the sprint (from my perspective at least, there may have been some confusion with pushing to GitLab). As such, we weren’t able to get to all of the issues, and only got 14 weight out of the 24 weight assigned to our team fully merged in. I was offering support during the whole sprint, but it seemed like team members were not able to coordinate into a meeting at the same time for most of the sprint. I don’t really have a great reasoning for this, it seems like things weren’t being done until the time was very short to were we couldn’t get everything done, taking all of our other schoolwork into account.
Ultimately, I think for next sprint our team really just needs to work on spreading work out during the entire sprint rather than getting things done last minute. We should also work on coordination and being more present, as when anyone asked if we wanted to do a meeting, the team would all say they were available and no one would take the initiative to actually begin the meeting. Part of that is on me as scrum master, but ultimately we should be willing to meet without having everyone on board if we are working on specific issues.
I was able to spread out my work fairly well as an individual, but I can’t say the same for other team members, and so as scrum master I should be more active in making sure everyone is doing their work not just so the project moves forward, but so everyone gets the credit they need for the course.
From the blog CS@Worcester – V's CompSCi Blog by V and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.