Now that the second sprint of the Naturalization Interview Confidence Environment project has ended, it is time to yet again reflect on the progress that my team and myself as this sprint’s Scrum Master have made thus far. Moreover, it is also time to reflect on what went right on wrong during this sprint, both in regard to what we as a team decided to improve upon based on what we discussed during our first retrospective, as well as what new obstacles may have shown up during the second sprint. It is important to note that in this sprint, unlike the first, the team had a sense of direction as to what needed to be done. For comparison, during the first sprint we were more concerned with determining what development framework we would need to use for the project while in the second sprint we had somewhat begun the development process of the project as well as creating the infrastructure for development. Though some progress may have been made, this sprint did not prove to be as fruitful as the last.
In this sprint, we as a team had planned on working on 36 issues across 5 epics. Moreover, for this sprint, the main team was separated into two sub-groups with one working on creating the application itself while the other worked on creating the Docker development infrastructure needed for future development. The application development group, of which I was a part, was tasked with implementing the following functionalities:
- Adding the reading portion of the interview questions
- Adding the writing portion of the interview questions
- Adding the Oath of Allegiance page
- Learning how to use conventional commits as well as general version control.
as well as other functionalities that would be necessary, such as ways to navigate between the aforementioned functionalities. I was primarily tasked with implementing the reading portion of the application (as linked above), meaning I needed to implement the necessary functionality for a user to be able to see previews of the questions that are to be included in the application, as well as interact with each question separately. Though I was tasked to implement a specific functionality, I was still expected to help my teammates of the application team in the case they needed assistance with their own task, as well as provide support to the Docker infrastructure team.
Though, admittedly, the breaks that occurred during the sprint contributed to hindering the structure of our productivity, as well as certain tasks taking much longer to work on than we had anticipated, there was still some progress regarding the infrastructure aspect of the project which continues to be worked on and improved by the responsible team members. Some problems that we had noticed in retrospect are mostly related to our management of time both during and outside meetings. As a scrum leader I still had issues managing our time during meetings such that there was a balance between allowing all team members to express themselves fully as well as using the meetings to outline what progress has been made and what progress needs to be made. Moreover, though we as a group acknowledged that documentation is extremely important, there was still lack of proper documentation and clarity in issues, which contributed to the improper time management of our meetings since there was more focus discussing what each new issue actually meant, thus meeting discussions wound up being somewhat disorganized. On a positive note, however, our approach of “Divide-and-conquer” from last sprint was crucial in helping the team establish who would do what tasks, either regarding the application or the infrastructure. Moreover, there has been substantial improvement regarding documenting what is being discussed during meetings, with certain issues having the appropriate context needed to ensure proper communication of our goals and progress between team members.
As detailed above, while this sprint had its flaws regarding productivity and time management, there was still some progress made regarding development and infrastructure. While we all, as a team, acknowledge that some mistakes from the first sprint were still present in the second sprint, we are all still willing to learn from such mistakes and improve our own productivity and communication.
Direct links to issues:
1) Build a page that shows previews of the questions for the interview: https://gitlab.com/worcester/cs/naturalization-interview-confidence-environment/demo-react/-/issues/28
2) Learn how to use commitlint/conventional commits for the Application source code: https://gitlab.com/worcester/cs/naturalization-interview-confidence-environment/General/-/issues/13
From the blog CS@Worcester – CompSci Log by sohoda and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.