Week 4 Retrospectives

Group Status Report

Status

Morale

Inidividual Status Reports

Alberto

• What went well:
  

  We pitched our product to the customer (the professor). Finalizing the pitch allowed us to also have a clearer idea of everything that will go into the development process. We also researched the tech stack further to be able to make more informed decisions on which technologies are needed for the project.

• What I learned this week:
  

  We should have set a regular schedule of meetings earlier. There is a lot to learn from listening to other teams' check-ins during lecture time.

• What can I do to improve:
  

  Have clear agendas before each meeting, have a clear plan and split tasks to be more efficient.

• Inidividual morale:
  

  A little overwhelmed and discouraged as I feel like I failed to be the best "planner" at the beginning. But it is all about learning and growing.

Alex

• What went well:
  I think this week, we accomplished getting more organized for the steps going forward. Before finalizing our technology stack, we made sure to meet with the client to pitch our proposal. By the end of the week, we had a more finalized technology stack that took into consideration client's concerns, our own research, and our own experience. On top of this, we also now have established meeting times and detailed our first sprint tasks.

• What I learned this week:
  I'm becoming more aware of how many components and options there are to consider when coming up with a technology stack for a web application. Not only are there many components (front end, back end, server, database, host, CI) to consider, but each of these have multiple options, and all chosen need to work together.

• What can I do to improve:
  I need to become more technically familiar with the tools we've chosen to move forward with so that I can meaningfully contribute.

• Inidividual morale:
  More apprehensive than last week regarding lack of familiarity with tools. However, my guess is that I will feel more settled after I've played around with our basic React app locally and gone through the exercise of adding a simple feature and unit test, as part of this coming week's tasks. I think going through this will demystify a bit.

Chang

• What went well:
  

  This week we finished our project plan. We decided to build a chat app. After several meetings, we chose a suitable technology stack, and everyone felt confident in implementing a great project.

• What I learned this week:
  

  I started to create a CI/CD pipeline with my teammates Alex and Edward. Thanks to these guys, we built a simple one, and it can test and deploy our front-end app automatically.

• What can I do to improve:
  

  Do more research on how to write unit tests, UI tests and integration tests.

• Inidividual morale:
  

  We are a good team and I believe we will present a perfect product.

Dian

• What went well:
  For this week, we finalize our project idea to a web chat app, which is more like a scratch paper that we can paint whatever we want there. It is simple but will be fun to do. We brandstormed some cool features but also de-risked the project so we wouldn't go astray. We also started think of the CICD pipeline and technology we are going to use. We were productive during the meetings and I can see a scratch of our app.

• What I learned this week:
  I learned that the ideation phase is the hardest part of the software engineering. An idea can be great but risky and eventually fails. A simple idea can also be great if it is within constraints and some cool features are added to it. Speaking of risk, it is the biggest enemy of the software development. It can cause unproductivity or even failure during a software development process if the team do not pay much attention to it. So de-risking the project is another important concept I learned.

• What can I do to improve:
  I have limited experience on project setup and deployment and I would like to know more about the CICD pipeline. I will also look into the socket.io library to be familiar with the cores of our chat app.

• Inidividual morale:
  Everything looks good and I will keep catching up with my teammates. I think I can do better if I start coding. LOL.

Edward

• What went well:
  

  For this week, we were able to finalize our project plan and deliever a good pitch to the professor. To do this, we had a few meetings going over the constraints of our project, the risk assessment, deliverables we wanted to obtain, and the overall general timeline for the project. The team worked fairly well to accomplish these tasks and we've been learning more about the software engineering process along the way. Our next steps is going to be implementing the CI pipeline and setting up our repository with the testing framework. It's a bit surprising that we're approaching week 5 without having started the MVP yet... but trust in the process!

• What I learned this week:
  

  1. Risk assessment of the project is very important and has little overhead cost time.
  2. There are different frontend technologies that can and cannot support screen reading features. It's important to understand the target audience of our application and ensure that our product is user friendly to everyone within the audience.

• What can I do to improve:
  

  I think although the team has been progressing fairly well, we haven't had a lot of group bonding outside of work hours. In my eyes, the team is a bit more disconnected given the nature of the course (it's online) and the lack of face to face interactions. I'm hoping that we can start having more regular, well-scheduled meetings and have individuals come more prepared to these meetings.

• Inidividual morale:
  

  Chugging along! All in all, I think our team is still on track but I would personally like to pick up the pace a little more.

Jason

• What went well:
  

  We meet regularly and we were able to deliver a pitch and come up with a software diagram, the team atmosphere is positive.

• What I learned this week:
  

  I learned about software categorization and what a pitch is. Risk-driven (and risk assessment) is a really good approach in software engineering.

• What can I do to improve:
  

  I think we need to pick a the pace a little bit to actually starting writing documentation and code.

• Inidividual morale:
  

  Let's keep up the good work and strive to be better!