Sprint Two Retrospective

We are nearing the end of the semester, and with that have completed our second sprint. It has formally spanned from the 5th of March to the 7th of April, a week shorter than was initially planned due to what I believe were time constraints. Our sprint consisted of four goals, and of those goals we were able to complete two. The sprint was largely divided into two "parts". The first part is what we actually completed; the "prep-work". This involved the necessary preparations our team needed to start test development, which consisted of creating a new branch dedicated to frontend-testing (our team), and building a new container that had the necessary testing tools needed for our tests. These necessary tools were Playwright and Vitest.  The second part, and the part we did not finish, was themed around the actual test development. This involved all of us independently writing draft-tests, to help us formalize a methodology we could follow, as a group, when writing our actual tests, and our first formal test, dedicated to the functionality of the site's main page. 

Ideally we would have completed all of our sprint goals, a couple of things contributed to us not being able to do so. Firstly, as I mentioned, the sprint was shorter than it was initially intended to be, lasting 1 week shorter (3 weeks instead of 4). This would have given us an extra week to begin our test development, but I do not believe it would have allowed us to complete our remaining two goals. Secondly, and more importantly, building our dev container was substantially more complex than we initially thought it would be. Going into this goal, a grand total of zero people on our team had experience of any capacity building containers, which is fine, but meant that we had a lot of learning to do. We spent the vast majority of the sprint on this step. 

Despite us not completing our goals, in my personal opinion I still believe this sprint went pretty well. I wouldn't say it went great, if that was the case we would have completed all of our goals. However, we managed to maintain a consistent level of productivity throughout and more importantly, every person on the team carried their own weight, with no one in particular doing too much or too little. Everyone had something to contribute every meeting, people were active participants in discussions, and no one had to be compelled to action, everyone took initiative in their work. That being said, there is always room for improvement, and I believe the biggest thing we could have done in this sprint is maintain better communication between our in-class meetings. Whenever we met in class, a lot of work got done. However, the in-betweens consisted of a lot of nothing, and there was admittedly not much communication done between anyone. The obvious solution to this would be to have some dedicated opportunities to meet outside of classes throughout the week; I think this is definitely something worth considering. As for how to improve personally, I think I could do a lot better in regards to reaching out to my classmates when I need help with something. I say this because there is another team, the dependency team, that would have been a huge help with our container work, yet I did not go to them once during the entire process.

If I had to choose a pattern from the Apprenticeship Patterns book, as I did in the first sprint retrospective blog I wrote, I would choose "rubbing elbows". This pattern emphasizes learning through close, consistent interaction with other developers. Instead of working in isolation, you deliberately place yourself near teammates. It should be obvious why this would have been beneficial, as I mentioned it would have done me very well to consult people more knowledgeable about what I was trying to do, it would have sped up the learning process and allowed our group to complete the goal faster.