This second sprint has been a bit better in terms of actionable steps; this was aided greatly by the mock front and back end. The mock allowed us to test configuring a realm to a container locally which was the floor for proof of concept. Unfortunately, the lack of architecture made further progress confusing as I didn’t understand why all images couldn’t be on same container network. After it was determined that the architecture called for further subdivision, it became unclear what microservices should be on which image and/or network. For instance, it was more or less determined that Keycloak should be on its own separate container (presumably with WildFly) but at the beginning of sprint I wrongly believed, based on previous internet searches, that NGINX should be on the same image as Keycloak but this was later discovered to be unnecessary as the mock front end contains NGINX within our system.
On that same note, the task breakdown and codification into issues for the respective boards suffers from an incongruity where ignorance of the matter begets ignorance in the approach and then future work is inaccurately reflected in the process. This isn’t necessarily an issue with the approach as whole but it seems as though, for the past two sprints, this unfamiliarity with the microservices and their implementation into our architecture forced me into a series of micro pivots which quickly evanesced away from the originally declared issues. If the goal of scrum is not to constantly be inundated with creating issue cards, updating them, and closing the now obsolete ones, then perhaps it would behoove us to reconsider the amount of research time necessary or have a much more closely-guided approach to issue construction. If this rapid pivoting away from cards is acceptable (and their grades reflect this) then that’s not particularly bad news for students. However, we have to be honest with ourselves and have the hard conversation that Scrum in this setting does not accurately map to what Behr, et al. would refer to as WIP (work in progress).
The low-hanging fruit of constructive team feedback would be the necessity of more frequent external meetings. It certainly was not for lack of trying; the most charitable reading of the situation was that I found there to be no strong consensus on when the team schedules would align. We also would have benefited from more frequent contact internally. Barring all real-world, unforeseen, obligations that took team members away from us the scattering of the team into groups caused our reviews to be staggered resulting in the loss of two full class periods of collaboration. My prescription for this would be that those who come after us should successfully drill down on establishing a running prototype before splitting off into the other groups.
My individual criticisms to my work flow largely still touch on the externalities I’ve lamented in a prior blog post but, if I must touch on them briefly, they’ve stayed mostly the same. It’s quite apparent that certain teaching staff in the university have struggled to pivot to remote teaching and, if I’m to attribute to ignorance and not malice, they seem to have bequeathed those struggles to their students. To those teachers I would like to remind them that Monday holidays are not a surprise and certainly not an invitation to delegate away your teaching responsibilities because you’re lagging behind curriculum milestones. If these teachers cannot grade in a timely manner, then my deepest sympathies, but please do not complain that the bulk of your students keep getting concepts incorrect and you have to re-grade their assignments and/or assign extra credit to help inflate grades. I’m a commuter student with one semester until graduation so I will stay here at Worcester State; if I was a commuter student with two semesters left, I would have transferred out.
https://gitlab.com/nanuchi/techworld-js-docker-demo-app
When paired with their “Docker Tutorial For Beginners” has been an invaluable resource to teach myself Docker and use continuously as a reference.
From the blog CS@Worcester – Cameron Boyle's Computer Science Blog by cboylecsblog and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.