Week 6: First sprint

The first sprint.

The week kicked off with the sprint demo for the previous week in which Chris showed his progress with the dispatcher (the web app upon which we are building our dashboard extension on) and Steve the remote developer in Australia also spoke on his progress. It's cool to be apart of the team in this aspect and even be able to add my own input in some cases. From the teams feedback Patrick was to proceed with using google charts for the graphical elements of the dashboard page. I presented some progress I made on a couple endpoints in order to gather feedback which proved fruitful, it took a bit to get my head around it all due needing to learn the code I was working with.

The next day we had the sprint meeting which is where we plan out our user stories for the coming two weeks and clean up last weeks sprint if necessary. We also do this fun thing where we assign 'story points' to our user stories in attempt to estimate the amount of time they will take. We do this as a team, all voting at the same time. Usually we then go with the median score but sometimes we will have a discussion and agree on a number following that, this turns out to be quite a great tool when it comes estimating the time to complete development tasks.

So the first sprint began, yay. We set out to work on our user stories, at this point I had constructed a couple endpoints so for the rest of the week I continued to iterate upon them and also got another one up by the end of the week.

This sprints tasks, note that this involved a lot of behind the scenes work in learning/researching how this all work. This also involved my first foray into .NET unit testing which involved a slight learning curve as well.

Patrick and I worked in tandem in that I setup endpoints in a comfortable order for him to incorporate them into his work, saving the trickiest for last.

Before making our own branches in the projects repository we also did some research into git-flow which is an abstract idea of a git workflow, Chris was using this to manage his code so we were to follow suit in order to keep the branches and commits nice n tidy.

Snippet of code from my first endpoint created.