This sprint, in my mind, one of the most important things that I was able to figure out was getting connected to AMPATH team through the Zeplin app. It seems that someone, perhaps accidentally, disconnected me from the group. Once reconnected, I was able to connect the rest of my group.
Although it hardly was a difficult task, it is hard to overstate how important it is to be on the same page as the team you are building the product for. It could have prevented a lot of wasted time on our end, and it makes it more likely that they get the end product they want.
Probably the most important thing I did in terms of learning about the tools we will be using was creating a “spike.” It is a new term I’ve learned that I will add to my lexicon, meaning to build a prototype of a product, diving deep to learn as much as you can. I touched upon it in my last apprenticeship patterns blog post, on “breakable patterns.”
I failed to make a successful working prototype that did everything I wanted. It seems that I have less knowledge of how all these work together than I thought. This brings to mind the apprenticeship pattern mentioned earlier, “breakable patterns” — I leaned through failing.
I will return to the Angular “Tour of Heroes” the next day or two to fill in the gaps in my knowledge. I don’t think there’s very much that I’m missing, but what I am is important to making it work. I would like to do this as soon as possible to be as much of a useful contributing member of the group as I can be.
Last retrospective, I was optimistic about how much we would be able to do this sprint. In truth, I am a little disappointed that we were not able to complete as much as I hoped. I am still optimistic about what we can accomplish coming up, but I have to bear in mind there are only two sprints left.
I am hopeful we will get a lot accomplished, but I have to be realistic that it might not be as much as I would like. This is the time where I should be thinking about buckling down and dedicating several more hours per week on top of what I already dedicate to this class.
I do have to keep in mind the learning curve we are experiencing when working on a team project like this. It took us a long time to just get the program to build and run on our computers. We didn’t hear what we wanted the final product would look like from AMPATH until relatively recently.
However, I think we are approaching the end of the end of that learning curve. Once our scrum team gets one component finished, I am confident the second will come a lot easier. It is reasonable to hope we are able to do a third, and maybe a fourth if we we split up into smaller scrum teams. Anything beyond that might not be wishful thinking, but I learned my lesson for setting my expectations too high.
From the blog Sam Bryan by and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.
For this sprint wrap-up, we discussed how we are trying to move on based on our team planning meeting. One of my teammates, Kristi, along with Professor Wurst, tried to check out an idea they had and continued to bounce ideas back and forth with one another until they came to a conclusion.