Sprint #1 Retrospective Blog

Upon completing our first sprint and gathering for our retrospective meeting, it’s essential to reflect on what went well and identify areas where we can improve moving forward. Here’s a breakdown of our observations:

Reflection on what worked well:

• We successfully completed most of the small issues, achieving a completion rate of around 75%, which demonstrates our ability to tackle tasks effectively.
• Our meetings, though limited in frequency, were productive and provided valuable opportunities for discussion and collaboration.
• The quality of communication within the team was commendable, fostering a supportive and transparent environment for sharing progress and addressing challenges.

Reflection on what didn’t work well:

• We encountered challenges with Docker-compose issues and documentation, which impacted our ability to complete tasks efficiently.
• Despite aiming for a total weight of 20, we only managed to achieve 15, indicating a discrepancy between the assigned weights and the actual difficulty of the tasks.
• Details for issues were not easily accessible, as they were only located within the epics, leading to confusion and inefficiency.
• Issue distribution was uneven, with some team members shouldering heavier workloads than others.
• All GitLab logistics were handled by one person, potentially causing bottlenecks and hindering collaboration.
• Individuals tended to work on issues independently, lacking assistance or support from other group members.

What changes could be made to improve as a team:

Better teamwork should be our top priority if we want to grow as a group. To do this, we should encourage teammates to help one another out when necessary and promote cooperation and knowledge exchange. Furthermore, by more precisely allocating weights in light of the lessons we learned from the previous sprint, we can guarantee that activities are appropriately scoped and assigned, averting disparities in workload allocation. Cooperation and efficiency will be enhanced by improving our knowledge of using GitLab and proactively supporting team members when necessary. Furthermore, it can facilitate communication and task execution to make issue details directly accessible from the issue itself, as opposed to only from the epic. Lastly, delegating tasks to one another instead of having one person do them all helps spread responsibilities fairly and encourage a sense of ownership among team members.

Works that I was assigned for and what changes could be made to improve as an individual:
During the previous sprint, I tackled two tasks within the ReportingBackend and ReportingIntegration projects for our LibreFoodPantry endeavor. For the first task, I was assigned with renaming the “commands” folder to “bin” (https://gitlab.com/groups/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/theas-pantry/-/epics/19) for both Reporting Backend and Reporting Integration. This involved not only simply renaming the folder but also ensuring that any references to “commands” within the codebase were updated to “bin” to maintain consistency. Although I successfully made the necessary changes to the scripts paths and ensured the projects ran smoothly, I overlooked updating all related documentation, which remained referencing the old paths.

For the second issue, I took on the challenge of integrating the AlexJS linter into the ReportingIntegration project’s pipelines (https://gitlab.com/groups/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/theas-pantry/-/epics/16). While initially encountering difficulties due to missing scripts, I leveraged external resources provided by our professor to overcome these obstacles. However, my decision to ignore certain files in the AlexJS test led to later feedback about refining this approach.

Moving forward, I recognize the importance of meticulous attention to detail and thoroughness in my work to avoid similar oversights and prioritize spending ample time on each task.