Sprint Three Retrospective

Our final sprint is over, and the course itself will be wrapping up soon as well. Once this semester ends I will be a graduate. Scary. Anyways the sprint itself spanned a month like the other two, formally ending on the 30th of last month. Unlike the last one, this sprint wasn't cut short and lasted the whole month. The sprint had five goals, of which we completed four of them. Firstly, we needed to update our container with the latest dependencies, which would then allow us to carry out the rest of the goals. After that we moved onto what took by far the most time; we all independently drafted a series of tests, which we would then present to the group for us to decide on what was good or bad about each, with the plan of incorporating that knowledge into a 'methodology' for developing subsequent tests. Naturally that leads into our third sprint goal which was to fully write a comprehensive series of tests for the main page (and wherever it lead in the case of e2e tests. This goal was ultimately not completed as we didn't get around to it in time. Our last two goals were things we worked on alongside the prior goals during the sprint. The fourth was independent test developments. We had originally planned to do this when we were done with fully testing the main page, but decided to pivot to this step in lieu of the time constraints. Finally, our last goal was documentation. Since we had essentially built an entirely new aspect of the project that wasn't there prior to the start of the semester, we felt it would be necessary to document both the purpose of our frontend tests, and more importantly how to get everything working (the necessary dependencies, extensions, etc.). We were able to complete this goal. 

Naturally, it would have been nice to finish all of our goals. We fell a bit short like we did during the last sprint, however this time around it wasn't due to the sprint being cut short but more so due to being a bit too 'ambitious' with our goals. The frontend test drafts took up the majority of the sprint, bleeding into the first and last week of it. While we worked on some of the goals in tandem (namely the documentation), this hardly left us enough time to even get started on the subsequent goals. I think there was a lot of room for improvement in regards to time management, but I was pretty familiar with the pace at which our team worked at that point and simply put too much on our plate. Individually I was also pretty bad with explicitly blocking out time to work on this class, I was a bit overwhelmed with all of my finals and other projects and didn't was consistently unable to work as much as I would have wanted (I don't intend to use this as an excuse, this IS another class after all). Google calendars has become a good friend of mine recently, maybe he could have helped with this class as well. I wouldn't say our sprint was a failure, however, or even anything remotely close. We were still able to get a considerable amount of work done, and our group over the last half of the capstone has been working very well together. There has been virtually no friction between group members, everyone is communicative and no one really fell behind in regards to how much they pitched in. 

For this sprint, the apprenticeship pattern from the book I mentioned in my previous retrospectives, I think 'Reflect as You Work' is a good choice. Now, I am not choosing this one because it was something I actively did during the sprint, but because it is something I believe would have been very helpful to keep in mind. It says to 'constantly think about how you are working', which I think applies to things like pace and efficiency as well. That little bit of extra optimization in that regard, I think, would have given us more time to work on a few of the other sprint goals as well.