Sprint 1 was huge learning opportunity for me especially as it incorporated the concept of a scrum master. Leading and working in a small team sounds like an easy task to do but that’s not always the case as we’ve explored throughout this semester. Each individual possessed different skills that we planned to exercise in making contributions to the project. Thea’s Food Pantry, an open source project runs on a micro-services architecture with several components. The three major components include; Reporting, Inventory and Guest Info System. Our group was assigned the Reporting System and I was assigned the task of mostly working on the backend portion.
Inside the backend service itself there were other pieces that had to be put in place such as development containers commonly referred to as devcontainers, updating from vanilla JavaScript to modern JavaScript connotations through the ‘use strict’ keyword and changing variable declarations from ‘var’ to ‘let’ or ‘const’ where applicable. Up to this point I had not encountered any significant obstacles as I’m about to elaborate. Below is the link to the issue that I worked on;
We got introduced to the command ‘git squash’ which combines multiple commits into one. This was something new I had never encountered as a casual user of git. The general commands I had worked with previously included git add, git commit -m “Commit message”, git push, git status, git checkout, git reset –hard, git pull etc. Squash came in pretty handy when working on a branch and submitting multiple changes as one.
The next major thing I learned was working with the issues board and merge requests. In the beginning, theses were slightly hard to navigate as far as identifying what part of the code needed to be modified to satisfy and solve the issue at hand so it could be moved from in-process to needs review. Also, identifying what branch or version of the main source to work with was a major obstacle for me that I later learned to do correctly. We discovered that the proper way to contribute to the main project was by creating merge requests. Git merge requests automatically creates a branch that you can work on so you do not need to manually create one. This was valuable information we wish we had learned earlier. However, since this wasn’t the case, we had several manually created branches that ended up being a bit quirky to merge with the main project. Below is the link to the merged request I worked on;
Something I plan on being better at for this next sprint is to correctly examine and weigh issues and tasks that I assign myself. I had imagined that we would complete this project within three quarters of the semester and use the other quarter to make cosmetic changes to the software, but this hasn’t been the case. I also commit on closely working with my peers, by communicating effectively what and how I’m doing as far as the project is concerned. My hope is that Sprint 2 will be much smoother and faster compared to Sprint 1.
