As many of the others in my group have said this was probably the best Sprint, we have had this semester. What specifically went well this semester was right when the Sprint started. That was a problem we had the last Sprint because we had a slow start because of Spring break. When this semester started, a lot of us were in the middle of working on issues so when this Sprint started, we continued working on the issues. A big problem we had last Sprint was we did not do enough documentation. Towards the end of the second Sprint and the beginning of this Sprint, our group made a big change. We decided that we would do little to no work in class and instead focus on updating the group on what we are working on, cleaning up our issue board, resolving any major issues that we encounter before that class, and documenting the progress we made in and out of class. This is because we made the realization that most of us in the group worked better alone, but when we ran into issues none of us were shy about bringing them up in the group meetings. We also did not have any issue asking others in the group for help. This was one of the most successful changes we made to the group. When we made this change, it caused the productivity of the project to skyrocket.
What I think did not go with this sprint was how ambitious our group was this sprint. We planned to get a lot complete in a short time and it did not all get done. For example, we wanted to complete the cards.js file and the display.js file as well as the prompts.js and writing.js file. We also wanted to add theming to our project so that it would look neat and professional. We ended up finishing the cards.js file but did not finish working out all of the bugs for the display.js file. In terms of the writing portion of the project, what we wanted to use at the start of the sprint did not end up working and we ended up adding a placeholder with some functionality so that we could have something to present.
I think we did not have too much to work on this sprint as a team. For the most part, I think it worked out very well. I think as a team we really improved our documentation this sprint. What I think we can improve a little is our individual documentation for issues and other small features that we worked on. Towards the end of the sprint, our documentation was a little lacking compared to the beginning of the sprint because we were rushing to the finish.
During the sprint, what I worked on was leftover from the previous sprint. In the previous sprint, we made a display page, but it did not properly transfer information from one page to another.
So, for a while, I contemplated how to move forward in the project and considered restructuring our project or looking at other ways to transfer information from one page to another.
How I fixed these issues was by simplifying our structure and moving screens to their own respective files.
Before this change, our app.js file did too much and was handling the navigation for the project as well as creating multiple screens. Moving things to their own files simplified our file structure and fixed some of our earlier navigation issues as a result.
When I did this change to restructure our project, it made creating the display page a lot easier and I was able to get it working to an extent. We can transfer information and display it on the screen but it currently does not display the correct information.
This is not because our function is wrong but because our logic is off. The function displays whatever we pass but we have a hard time figuring out what to pass. I was really stubborn at first when I encountered this issue and did not want to ask for this last issue. I have the issue at a weight of 2 but it is definitely more. Even when we had three people working on it, it was not done. So, what I need to improve on is to be less stubborn and ask for help even if it’s last minute.
From the blog CS@Worcester – Just a Guy Passing By by Eric Nguyen and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.