This is the Sprint 2 Retrospective for team The IncreEdibles. We got assign to food pantry development, but we didn’t give any specific task. Big part of our team is design program and listen to the food pantry owner. There are two projects that we are working on, one is the make API that support other project where they can pull any information that they want. The other project is to work with Worcester State University food pantry.
As a group we decided to focus on WSU food pantry since we see more potential in this project. First, we want to know what the important features that costumers want. We learned that setup with costumers is not easy, not just to set the time and place for meeting. We have setup our communication on Slack, but most of the costumers are not in tech they don’t want to install complicate software. They want to have program where simple “plug and play”, so their energy can focus on what important to them. This is the problem that I think we always face with customers. We as developers before the meeting need to have set of question to ask, not all customers know what they want. We had meeting with Joanne, the professor who run the program. She wants to know who goes in and how much they take out the food, keeping track with the amount of food (by weight) is the main feature.
We took notes from the meeting and make email as direct communication that convenient for both parties. These features are important, but we must think of the design future features as program getting update. Features that they don’t think they need at this moment, that mean we must track data. These are sensitive data, we must be caution. The features seem not difficult as keep up with the weight of the food, but we want to have reliable program where it’s simple and easy to prepare/add feature.
There are few techs that our group need to know, OneCard swipe machine, we need to know that it is operative and how to implement to our program. How to export from the “sign up” Google Form. Export form that the costumer can export to submit to Worcester Food pantry. And most important is design our program where it is simple, clean and it do what it’s supposed to do.
Our next step is researching all the techs to make all priority feature work. Make a mock program, and present/sell it to the costumers. In this sprint we want to know how far we can get this program to work. There is other group in different section also look at this program, our problem is time difference and communication. If they have the same direction as us, we should find a way to divide the program into two parts that two group could work on. We find that the communication is one of the biggest problems even with members in the same group.
From the blog CS@Worcester – Nhat's Blog by Nhat Truong Le and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.
