Phase 1: Sprint 1 Recap - Blog 07

Last week, we set the end date for the first sprint of implementation to be today. The goal for today from our prospective last Thursday was to have a working, presentable product to show to our client. While we knew this would be a challenge, the back-end team did a very good job at splitting the work, working together on reviewing all of the code that everyone contributed, and above all we did an excellent job communicating with each other regarding obstacles and inconsistencies that arose. This team-wide work ethic enabled us to complete, in its entirety, the back-end our system for Phase 1 a couple days before the end of the sprint. This allowed to reallocate our resources to the front-end who, for some reason, didn't start implementing the code for the front-end facades until we were nearly finished with all the back-end code.

On Monday this week, the back end was nearly complete, but we couldn't see any of the front-end code in our git repository. Curious and growing impatient, we asked them "what's up with the front-end, have you guys written any code?" They defended their negative response with the excuse that they haven't decided which language to use yet -- something the back-end team concluded upon over a month ago. This means that while the 5 of us working in the back-end were putting in the effort in to write around 1000 lines of code over 10 days, the 8 front-end guys did nothing but twittle their thumbs, writing nothing other than the basic HTML headings and labels. When Tuesday arrived and we noticed how the back-end was done, but the front-end had barely started, Charles migrated over to help produce what we are seeing today as our front-end. This frustrates me a bit because we had 2 whole weeks to reach our goal, and for whatever reason, the 7-8 member team working on the front-end was only, after receiving help from us, able to implement calls that retrieved bulk data from the back-end.

With the back-end completely functional, at least we had something to present in class today. The basic HTML along with the functionality Charles wrote allowed us to show the professor the progress we had made, and what we have yet to make. He anticipated that we would overestimate a realistic first deadline, and was ultimately pleased with the work the back-end team made. He was pleased to announce that the back-end team is ready to move onto Phase 2 of the system, which entails including the counts for the beginning, middle, and end of each session. However, he also mentioned though that the entire team needs to recognize the leftover front-end backlog from Sprint 1 of Phase 1 to be the priority. He suggested that 2-3 of us need to stay committed to the back-end to begin implementing Phase 2, so we can maintain a forward momentum of progress for the project. However, while all of us in the back-end can support this development of Phase 2, we need to be aware that Phase 1 still has higher priority, and that we should be prepared to drop everything we are working on to provide any required assistance to the front-end team to put Phase 1 completely in the past. The most likely plan, from what I gathered in the meeting, is that the front-end team will continue working on the user interface, and begin to implement the rest of the front-end facades. Andrew and Brad will most likely focus on developing Phase 2 of the back-end while Charles Adam and I do some handing holding to help finish the development of Phase 1's front-end facade.

This week coming up is Spring Break at Wentworth, so our next sprint will end 2 weeks from today. In 2 weeks, I imagine we will have Phase 1 completely done, the back-end of Phase 2 well under way, and the design for Phase 2 in the front-end in the planning stages. There won't be a blog post here until then, so tune back in then!