Category Archives: Sprint Retrospective – 1

Sprint Retrospective 1

The AWS deployment project was very surprising to me as it was not among my first choices. But with time, I am very confident with the evolution of the project and what the final product will look like. The god thing about our project is that we are all learning what to do. There is no sense of feeling behind or being ahead of others in the team as we are all new to most areas of the project. I believe this has allowed our team to be very open minded to any idea and to accept each other’s participation without any previous knowledge of what could be wrong or right. I appreciate the team workflow in the project and the trust we had in one another to get things done. The professor has been a great source of reassurance when we had couple of blockages (especially with the AWS) website. I believe that the accesses we have been given so far will be enough to get us started however, having worked with AWS website before, knowing how complex it can be, we might always need something more. Overall, we are a great team, out scrum master did a great job keeping the team together and maintaining respect and work ethics.

Improvements as a team

I have always been skeptical when it comes to working as a team. The reservations and worries about whether the work will get done, whether everyone will be involved, and the quality of the work reflected on our grades has been inevitable for me in the past. However, in this class, I feel very confident in the way we work as team and the way the professor assists us regularly to make sure we are involved and progressing. During our first sprint, we needed to make a lot of research to familiarize ourselves with the project. We didn’t find the need to meet outside of our stand-up meetings. That resulted in us not really communicating on the discord server, or any other platform outside of the classroom. In the future, as we will get more in depth in our project, I expect to improve this area and communicate more outside class for better planning and understanding among the team.

Improvements as an individual

As an Individual, I believe I did a good job on providing ideas, communicating with the entire team. I believe I specifically played the role of the reflector. The scrum master did a great job, but I was always willing to keep everyone on track when it was necessary. One area I could work on in the future is help improving the efficiency of our stand-up meetings. I noticed that my team is a quiet team which is not necessarily a bad thing. However, more common, and altogether conversations and unified ideas can be a good thing for the development of our team. Another thing I am planning on focusing more on the future is provide more in-depth reports on GitLab of the research we make. Our project is definitely a very interesting one and it would be great to share as many details as possible. The third area of improvement is to merge with the Identity and Access Management System(IAM) team regarding our project. We know for sure that keycloak will be a crucial part in our project. Meeting regularly with the IAM team to work together will make it easier for the two teams to move faster and not slow down each other on other things we could separately work on.

Evidence of GitLab activities

I did add the files in the General repository

https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/common-services/aws-deployment/general/-/issues/1

I did make research on Keycloak and worked a little bit with the IAM team. Keycloak is an open-source software product to allow single sign-on with Identity and Access Management aimed at modern applications and services. It helps securing applications. It is a reliable tool to help manage users identity and accesses.

https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/common-services/aws-deployment/general/-/issues/10

I did the Research on the best practices regarding the AWS EKS. Some of the best and important practices are the security, reliability, cluster autoscaling and running containers.

https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/common-services/aws-deployment/general/-/issues/8

From the blog CS@Worcester – Software Intellect by rkitenge91 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Sprint Retrospective

The first sprint was the very initial experience of me being a Scrum Master. It was an astonishing experience, and I have learned many things from this Sprint as well as from my teammates. From a personal perspective, I think things that worked well with us were being able to finish the entire issues that we had listed out during Sprint Planning. In addition, our team worked very efficiently as a group and barely had any conflicts during this first sprint. Everyone had the opportunity to express their ideas and to be able to ask questions. From that point, we had been able to work out the issues as a group rather than individually which was also a good point. Our team was also exceptional at listening to each other. This is a plus point, by listening to other people we would be able to learn more about that person along with the ideas.
Despite all the good things that we had during our first sprint, there were also some key issues that we would need to work on. First, although we communicated well and didn’t have any collision during the first sprint. We need to improve the communication on Gitlab. This was also mentioned by the professor in the Sprint Review. We did not show enough participation in Gitlab which led to our group losing one point for Sprint Review. Second, we did not split the amount of work equally and did not organize the work effectively. Hence, team members occasionally were confused about who was working on what part. During the first Sprint Planning, there was only one team member who contributed most of the issues and as a Scrum Master, I do not think I have done enough and contributed enough as I took on this big role.
The changes that I think we would need to do is to communicate on Gitlab by commenting on each other issues and contributing more to the issue board. Also, I think that every time we change the code, we need to inform our team members so that they could review changes that others have made to ensure that the code would not break the initial system. Another point is that our team needs to communicate more outside of the classroom such as Discord. During the first sprint, the only time that we talked and solved the issues was during class time.
As an individual, I think I would need to be more productive and do a better job as Scrum Master. During the first sprint, I did not have much idea of how to be a Scrum Master and specifically is how to be a good Scrum Master. As a scrum master, I did not do well with bringing everyone onto the same page and did not split the work evenly for every member. Also, I failed to keep track of the work that every team member had contributed. This to me in the future would not be a good thing because a good scrum master should be able to maintain and keep track of everybody’s work to make sure the products would be delivered on time.
The first sprint was such an interesting experience for me at I started working as a team compared to the previous semester. Even though there are many things that need to be improved individually and also as a team. Overall, the first sprint was not as bad as I thought it was going to be.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Hung Nguyen by hpnguyen27 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.