I think that we as a team, as well as me as an individual, improved during this sprint compared to the first sprint. While for the first sprint we had no experience working with scrum sprints or in any sort of team development environment, so the whole thing was completely new to us, whereas at least now with the 2nd sprint we had at least a tiny bit of experience. This means that we were able to improve upon some things from our first sprint, because we could see what we did wrong and could change our plan in order to avoid our previous mistakes and optimize our workflow overall.
The first thing we optimized and improved upon was our sprint planning. From our first sprint, we could better judge what we could get done during a sprint by how much we got done during our first sprint. This way we could efficiently work on items, getting as much done as possible during the sprint and not assigning too much during the sprint to the point that we end up not getting most of it done. We could also better assign weight to each of the items because we could better judge how long it would take for us to get each item done, and better judge the importance of each item to the overall project and current objective.
The second thing we optimized and improved upon was our overall communication. We still did most of our communication in class, but we now made sure to communicate through the issues on GitLab. When an issue required additional clarification or explanation, we could leave a comment on an issue and ask the creator of the issue for more details, and the creator could easily respond right on the issue. This not only improved upon the frequency of our communication, but it also helped us to differentiate and easily see what string of communication was pertinent to what issue, helping other team members to see what was discussed respective to what issues. This way, if a team member was working on an issue similar to or previously worked on by another team member, they could easily see what kind of issues that team member faced while working on it, and that could help them work through it without even requiring more help from the team. This makes the workflow as a whole much more efficient because any communication is saved, categorized, and easily searchable.
For the team as a whole, we could still improve upon our communication. Although it is efficient communicating through GitLab issues, and it does have some benefits, it is also good to have some non-official communication that doesn’t directly relate to a particular issue. Leaving this communication on GitLab would be messy, so it would be better if we did this additional communication through discord. For me as an individual, I think I could’ve helped more with the sprint planning, and better assisted my team members. For the spring planning, I could’ve better helped with coming up with weights for issues and assigning them. Finally, I could’ve better helped my teammates by being more active responding to open issues with comments and helping them finish open issues if I’m done with all of my issues.
From the blog CS@Worcester – Alex's Blog by anelson42 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.