This week concluded the second sprint with my work on the UpdateGuest team developing for LibreFoodPantry. This sprint was exciting as we began creating the implementation of our service.

One of the first issues I helped work on this sprint was coming up with questions for the Thea’s Pantry staff member for when they came to our class.

During this sprint our team also focused on improving working together as a team as were beginning to implement our service.

An issue directly related to this included standardizing our IDEs as we prepared to code together on this project.

Secondly, as part of learning to code as a team I also re-read the first five chapters of Clean Code by Robert C. Martin to review best coding practices.

Additionally during this sprint I helped to implement the web interface for our frontend service where I began to learn how to use Angular again and also learned how to use Angular Material. This issue has two merge requests associated with it, one mainly adding Angular Material to the project, and another adding the implementation of the Web UI.

During this sprint I also reviewed and commented on two different merge requests. The first merge request was for implementing MongoDb for our backend service. The second was for the front end architecture document.

Individually, I think I am getting better at becoming a Scrum Master and learning to listen to other people during our meetings as I help to facilitate them. Although I have found it harder to do this when we switched to online meetings as sometimes it is harder to hear people talk than in-person. During the final sprint I would still like to improve on my ability to listen to other people’s suggestions, both during meetings and on GitLab.

I do think I need to get better at being patient with the rate that changes are made. This issue specifically occurred with a merge request when I directly made changes to a branch without asking first (even though I figured I should) as I thought it would be quicker than submitting another review for it. I do regret doing this as it led to a small conflict. We did resolve this issue and as a team we have made a new working policy that helps address this issue, so each developer only works on their branch individually to help avoid merge conflicts, in addition to helping with this issue.

As a team I think we did good this sprint. We finished several issues early on in the sprint and I am particularly happy with the work that was accomplished for the backend service and the web UI. I think that our team was also better at communicating this sprint and that we have improved our communication on issues and our use of GitLab to coordinate and communicate with each other. I also think we had some great collaboration this sprint with reviewing each other’s work, discussing and implementing suggestions, and even having multiple people working on the same branch.

I also think there is further room for improvement with our communication over GitLab and in meetings. Improving GitLab communication is especially important since we no longer have face-to-face meetings, and GitLab is where most of the remaining time discussing issues and work will be spent in the upcoming final sprint.

I do wish we were able to finish all of the issues we planned on doing for this sprint, but I understand that given the many different events over the past month that other things just got in the way of this. Part of this issue also has to do with the weights issues were assigned during planning. I personally think I need to improve my weighting estimates for issues as this seemed way off for this sprint. I think this was part of the reason we were unable to finish all of our issues as issues became more involved and took longer than was originally anticipated when planning for the sprint. Additionally, I think as a team we need to break issues into both smaller and more defined tasks, that way the work is more defined and the issue weight can be estimated more clearly. These factors are something I have been trying to take into account for while planning for the last sprint.

Overall, I am looking forward to our upcoming final sprint and I am excited to see if we can finish the UpdateGuest service.