For our second sprint I think our group improved in many aspects of the process. Last sprint there was a lot of confusion around what exactly needed to be done and how, as well as issues with managing time and expectations. The group also had relatively poor over all communication over discord, although that was more attributed to the fact that many tasks did not really need to involve more than one team member at a time. We addressed those issues in the last sprint retrospective and this sprint I believe that we did much better over all. Firstly we communicated much more than before, using discord more often to ask questions or gather information that we need from other groups. We also had more clear goals this sprint, which consisted of getting many aspects of the back end written up and hopefully working, as well as finishing up refactoring the front end. The team did a good job getting all the tasks done in a timely manner, even writing in stand-in code in areas where another team member was working on implementing a feature. In this case that team member was me, as I was working on inventory.js my team was finishing up their endpoints, and since they could not connect to anything they created stand-ins while I finished up my portion of the project. Another area I think we did good in this sprint was being timely with merge request approvals. This sprint if a merge request was created it tended to be approve within a few hours.

As a team I think we did much better this sprint compared to the previous sprint, and we flushed out pretty much all the big issues we had before. I do not really have any suggestions for things that we could improve going forward as a team. We communicated well, managed our time and work load well, and in the end got almost everything we needed done. As a team we have found a system that works. As an individual however I definitely have some things that I know I can continue to work on to improve going forward. The biggest is still time management. I did better with my own time management this time but I still could do better as I did leave many issues for later in the sprint; however I did not save them for the last second like I did before.

Since there was not too much that can be criticized with the teams performance this sprint, there are not many things I believe that we need to directly address to improve on next sprint. We will however need to keep this level of performance, and most likely bring it up a notch next sprint. While we have not had a planning session yet, we have discussed an abstract of what will happen next sprint, and the main focus will be testing and fixing bugs. Given that this will be a very involved task we will need to be communicating even more and there will have to be more collaboration between members as bugs may pop up in multiple areas of the project.

https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/theas-pantry/inventorysystem/backend/-/blob/BackendCreation/src/data/inventory.js

I primarily worked on getting inventory.js written out with the correct endpoint connections so that the team members working on the endpoints can use them to connect to the DB.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Sebastian's CS Blog by sserafin1 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

I thought this sprint went well. While the team definitely has room for improvement, I thought that the team cooperated and managed to accomplish our main goal for the sprint, which was to give functionality to the backend of the project. We managed to add the necessary endpoints as well as give invesntory.js functionality. We also managed to accomplish other tasks like adding commitlint to the gitlab-ci.yml file in all the projects repositories as well as coming to a consensus regarding the naming conventions and style decisions. I thought that, overall, the team was much more cohesive this sprint compared to the previous one. The team was able to communicate much more effectively, and the team was more aware of what needed to be accomplished.

I think the team still has room for improvement that could help us become even more cohesive and efficient. I think the biggest area where we could improve is how we come up with tasks and divide the labor. The tasks that we had in our sprint backlogs over the past couple of sprints were rather imbalanced. There were some tasks in there that were important, challenging, and took a lot of time to complete. But at the same time, there were also other tasks were minor, easy, and took little effort to complete. This led to some team members having tasks that would take them more than one sprint to complete, while other team members did many simple tasks and were left with little to do by the end of the sprint. I think this sprint we should try to break up the big tasks into smaller ones, and group minor tasks into bigger, more general tasks. I think team members should also ask the other team member for help if they think that they cannot finish their task by the end of the sprint.

Individually I thought that my performance was satisfactory. I mainly worked on adding commitlint to the gitlab-ci.yml file in the project repositories, but I also spent time trying to understand how RabbitMQ worked. For the latter, I created a demonstration for RabbitMQ that shows how things are sent and received. Ultimately, I managed to complete six tasks by the end of the sprint that are worth seven points. I think my biggest issue was that the tasked I worked on were either too specific like adding commitlint or too broad and vague like figuring out RabbitMQ. I also think that I didn’t communicate with my teammates as much as I should have.

Personally, I have a lot of room for improve in several areas. One of the areas that I want to see myself improve is communication. I felt like I did not communicate with my teammates as much as I should have. For example, I felt like I should have kept my teammates updated with my progress on the RabbitMQ demonstration. For the next sprint, I want to use Discord as well as class time to communicate with my teammates more. Another area where I want to improve is taking on more challenging tasks. Over the past couple of sprints, I felt like my tasks were either too simple or too minor. So, for the upcoming sprint, I want to try taking on a bigger and more challenge tasks.

List of issues that I worked on:

Issue InventoryAPI#2: Added commitlint in gitlab-ci.yml in InventoryAPI.

Issue AddInventoryFrontend#6: Added commitlint in gitlab-ci.yml in AddInventoryFrontend.

Issue CheckInventoryFrontend#4: Created gitlab-ci.yml in CheckInventoryFrontend and added commitlint.

Issue CheckOutGuestFrontend#7: Created gitlab-ci.yml in CheckOutGuestFrontend and added commitlint.

Issue InventoryBackend#27: Created gitlab-ci.yml in InventoryBackend and added commitlint.

Issue InventoryBackend#22: Spent time learning how Rabbit MQ works and created a simple demonstrations that shows how things are sent and received.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Fadi Akram by Fadi Akram and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

With reflection on the previous sprint we had a more clear vision of what we could modify and change about the front end systems and possibly some work to be done about the back end system. We also as a group decided to reach out to the IAM and AWS teams to see if we could integrate their work with ours. I also had not finished my previous tasks so it was an issue that I personally needed to address and focus on during this sprint.

I still had the two previous issues from the last sprint on my hands but I did take the responsibility of communicating with the other teams and start working on understanding their work to help integrate it with our team.

https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/theas-pantry/inventorysystem/checkoutguestfrontend/-/issues/8

On this sprint the majority of my time was working learning html and CSS, but in a manner that was constructive and effective as my previous sprint learning session did not go well. In this sprint I had a far more effective learning period by following a six hour html and CSS course which helped me greatly [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Rs2ND1ryYc]. A major portion of my time was watching this, pausing to test out the things I learned and working on the html pages for the Worcester state styled formatting. This would all have been added to their necessary repositories, but I noticed something both funny and disappointing at the same time that changed all the work that I needed to complete.

While I was nearing the end of the sprint I felt as if the pages I did have were ready for testing and possibly creating a branch for and wanted to test it in one of the front ends. I tried running the front end docker containers on my desktop, but I never could get the local host page to run. It would load forever and never show me anything. I also tried separate front ends to see if it was just one front end’s issues, but I still had the same issue. It wasn’t until I tried running two front ends at the same time and had to change one of the ports to discover that it was just local host 8080 that was having a hard time. I tried connecting to it without any containers running on those ports and a page I had not seen in a while showed. It turns out somewhere on my mac laptop Jenkins was running [https://www.jenkins.io/]. This was preventing me from running and I had to do a deep dive through my laptop to find it and stop it completely which had taken far more time than I wanted to. With it disabled I ran the containers and connected to the local host page. It was there that I found that a front end landing page had already been made and implemented and I had unnecessarily wasted my time on trying to create pages for the front end systems. Now I don’t feel as if my time learning on html was wasted but the app.vue already had the needed formatting and style that was appropriate for the landing pages.

Right at the weekend before the end of the sprint was around the time that the IAM team contacted me and provided information on how to set up the keycloak system and I had spent a little bit of time that weekend looking it over. That same weekend was when I had made the discovery about Jenkins. The href task was easy enough to implement and I had tested it and it worked. I just did not have the time at the end to create my own separate branch for each front end as I felt like it needed to be split into separate and specific issues for documentation reasons. The next sprint will have those two fully solved and I’ll probably be focusing the majority of my time on integrating the IAM teams work and testing out their work with ours, but at least I understand html fairly well now!

From the blog CS@Worcester – A Boolean Not An Or by Julion DeVincentis and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

For this sprint we did much better as a group. Communication improved and we are comfortable with the project now. After the first sprint I was worried about how we would perform but now I am much more confidant in our abilities. I am excited for what we will achieve during the upcoming sprint.

Over this past sprint we have gotten the backend to work, added commitlint, updated config files and pipelines, and learned how to use RabbitMQ. I personally did the commitlint for the backend, frontend, and API projects, and worked on the pipeline. I am happy about how everything turned out, and I feel like I learned a lot about how commitlint and the gitlab pipeline works. When working on commitlint I decided it would be cleaner to work in a separate branch since I needed to push to gitlab in order to test my work. I am happy about how it worked in the frontend project, but in the backend I accidentally worked on the main branch instead of the commitlint branch. When working in the future I must always be aware of which branch I am working on and review my work before pushing, since you should not orphan public commits.

When working on the frontend I ran into a problem that was not present for the other projects. I found a solution on stackoverflow and made a comment about it. I am not sure that this is the best place to explain myself since I wonder if people will be able to find my comment in the future.

One thing that I am happy about is that I have increased my workload. I still want to do more in the future, but I am happy that I am doing more to help my group out. I think this is something we could all work on as a group. Most of our work is done in class which is ok, but we would get much more done if we all worked outside of class. One thing I think we could do to improve this is to schedule out-of-class work sessions where we would work for a few hours.

One thing that I think didn’t go well was branching. We made many branches this past sprint, and I do not think we used them properly. In my case, I made a useless branch since I did not use it at all. I feel as though using many branches, while useful, can contribute to confusion with our team and future teams. I do think we should be branching, but I feel as though we could do it better.

Overall, I am happy with the progress we are making. I am glad that the backend works finally, and I am glad that the gitlab project is coming along. I am excited for the upcoming sprint since we have almost finished refactoring, and we can begin working on new features. I am concerned about making new features since I do not have any ideas as to what to do, but whatever we decide to do as a group will be fun to work on.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Ryan Blog by rtrembley and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Following sprint 2, I will start off by saying what worked well. I think we are a little more comfortable with how the sprint process works. An improvement from the last sprint was that we knew what needed to be done for this sprint. We as a team decided to try and flesh out the backend and get it working before we start building the frontend. I think that we went into the sprint strong as everyone sort of picked up issues and started right away. Personally, I spent most of the sprint time working on the removeInventory endpoint and trying to wrap my head around how it would work. I had to look back on past endpoints that I worked with to try and find something to base it off of and ended up with something that made sense to me. For the most part, everyone finished their respective issues and we ended the sprint with a more structured backend.

Of course there is always room for improvement so I think we could definitely improve in terms of communication. There wasn’t much communication between class sessions, mostly reporting back to the team during the standup meetings. While it wasn’t detrimental to the workflow, it should definitely be something to keep in mind, myself included. In the second half of the sprint, we were trying to get the endpoints in one place so that inventory.js could be written and tested. There were some inconsistencies that I found between the endpoints and inventory.js so we should’ve definitely coordinated to decide on function names. We also ran into some issues trying to run the backend container so we couldn’t actually test it this sprint. For the next sprint we will need to test the backend and make it function as intended.

Based on my previous statements, we should make a point to increase communication outside of class time. During this sprint it wasn’t a major issue since we were mainly focusing on our own issues and only needed to coordinate once everything was done. That being said, we should make sure to notify teammates when we finish working on things so that we can carry on smoothly. Since we will need to get the backend working for the next sprint, I think coordination between those who worked on the endpoints will be essential. 

I will say that I am guilty of the lack of communication. I should have just sent a quick message to the discord when I had created a merge request or had an issue in need review. In this case, once the removeInventory endpoint was completed, I should’ve let Sebastian know since he was writing Inventory.js and I could’ve coordinated with him on the function names. Throughout the sprint, I essentially only worked on one issue, which was creating the endpoint. I would like to be more productive, finish issues within their set weights, and then move along with the development. I know what needs to be immediately done for the third sprint so we should be going in strong. I look forward to getting the backend tested and moving onto frontend work.

Issue #25 in the backend involved creating the removeInventory.js endpoint, where I referred to the API and existing endpoints to create.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Null Pointer by vrotimmy and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.