Week 5 Retrospectives

Group Status Report

Status

Morale

Inidividual Status Reports

Alberto

• What went well:
  

  This week we started splitting up tasks: some of us worked on getting started with the documentation, while others were working on setting up the CI/CD pipeline. I like working in sub groups as it allows each sub-team to take their own initiative, and it allows team members to also bond more closely than in the usual team meetings. We also made our meetings more consistent by finalizing a set schedule of 2 weekly check-in meetings, with a longer sprint meeting every Sunday. This definitely helped with giving the team a more professional and serious look.

• What I learned this week:
  

  It is very important to schedule recurring meetings early on. We waited until now because before there didn't seem to be enough tasks to justify multiple meetings. However, it is always better to schedule a meeting and cancel it if there is no need to meet, rather than having to schedule last minute meetings or having to schedule day by day. As soon as there is a clear set of tasks that the team cannot possibly take on as a whole, it is necessary to split. Either assign specific roles to team members, or allow them to work on the tasks they are most interested in. The best is a combination of the two: it is good to have "experts" on different areas, but also to allow team members to experiment with different things when the pressure is low. Trello is a great tool for keeping track of progress, especially once you start dividing up tasks and it is hard to keep track of what is going on and what the next steps should be. I also learnt that if the team is reliable everyone will be on top of their tasks with no need for reminders.

• What can I do to improve:
  

  I definitely need to have a clearer agenda for each meeting. So far I mostly relied on Trello cards, but I also realized sometimes I really do not know what the next steps should be. I plan on meeting with Edward to draft a rough timeline of the next weeks of development to help with planning each week's meetings. Also, it is important to keep the meetings as short as possible. When meeting 3 times a week, you can plan on having two short update meetings, and one longer meeting for planning.

• Inidividual morale:
  

  I am happy with the progress made, and how the team is responding to the different tasks and adjustments. Now that we have a more professional meeting schedule, I believe everyone finds it easier to get into the rhythm. Even though no one ever slacked off even before. I am doing my best in leading the meetings, but I am not that experienced so it is definitely a learning curve. I appreciate the fact that the rest of the team is patient and always willing to give feedback.

Alex

• What went well:
  

  I think we did a good job organizing ourselves into doing and completing tasks within two groups of three. Everyone was accountable and seemed to be communicating about the shared tasks. This week we were successful in setting up our basic app and CI pipeline, and generating documentation for our tech stack, tutorials, and code review.

• What I learned this week:
  

  I mostly learned a lot about GitHub Actions this week. The learning process was more like trial and error than gaining a thorough understanding of all of the pieces at play, but now I have some understanding of how you can run automatic checks upon pushes and pull requests.

• What can I do to improve:
  

  This week was the first time we delegated tasks to different people and then came together to share what was completed. In retrospect, I realize I didn't have much feedback on the materials being presented to me. I did briefly skim these materials from the other group before the meeting, but I think in the future, I would like to either come prepared with more critical feedback, or at least review materials more critically afterward, if the meeting isn't a good time to think long and hard. either way, I think all of our materials can be improved with feedback that comes from taking a closer look.

• Inidividual morale:
  

  At the beginning of this week, I felt worse than last week in terms of apprehensiveness about being familiar with the tools and languages we're using. However, after having working with Edward, Chang, and Dian in setting up our GitHub Actions, I felt much more at ease for two reasons. The first reason is that last week, I felt that I was pretty useless in helping set up our Firebase React app. Chang did most of the manual setup, and Edward was able to follow what he was doing much better than myself. But this week, I felt like I actually contributed to getting our GitHub Actions set up instead of being a bystander. The second reason was that none of us knew how to set up these Actions at the outset. We all had to do a good amount of Googling and trial and error for a few hours until the actions were finally doing what we wanted. So, this experience also reminded me that despite me being behind my teammates in terms of experience doing web development, there are still things in this process that we're all going to be learning for the first time.

Chang

• What went well:
  

  This week we added new features to our pipeline. We set up a dev branch to protect the main branch. We built GitHub workflow guidelines for each teammate. With this process, our project would be excellent.

• What I learned this week:
  

  Learn more about Firebase. At first, I thought to set up two different Firebase projects in one repository is hard. Dian finished it, and I looked at what he changed in Firebase's configuration file. He added a new different project ID into .firebaserc, saved the credentials into Github, and wrote a new workflow file to process the dev branch.

• What can I do to improve:
  

  Learn how to construct a high efficient database schema for our application.

• Inidividual morale:
  

  I feel good. I'm looking forward to our next steps.

Dian

• What went well:
  

  We set up the pipeline successfully. We are using Github actions to enfore automatic testing and firebase deployment. We set up a dev branch for the development phase before merging everything to the main branch. We set up a pull request template for the author to implement a feature and reviewer to review someone's code. We set up a format for the user story so everyone can add the user story before implementing a new feature.

• What I learned this week:
  

  I learned the overflow of CI/CD pipeline using Github action for the Firebase deployment. I successfully set up a new Firebase instance and link it to our Github project. I learned that we can store login credentials into Github secrets and we can use those secrets within the Github workflow files.

• What can I do to improve:
  

  We still need to link Firestore database to our project. I suspect we still need to set up some linking in the workflow files, which might take some time. I still need to get touch on how to set up the firestore within the code and pipeline.

• Inidividual morale:
  

  We are doing fine by setting up the whole development environment but I would like to start implementing the actual web application so that we won't rush everything at the end of the quarter. I'm also excited to finally do some coding tasks.

Edward

• What went well:
  

  This week we were able to accomplish a fair amount of milestones: getting our intial documentation pipeline setup, getting our initial ci/cd pipeline setup, and getting our UI mocks finalized. As for the project, the main tasks we have left to do before we start coding is to checkin with the professor on our current progress and test our testing framework. Also set up an Among Us session this week!

• What I learned this week:
  

  This week, I was mainly tasked with helping out on the ci/cd pipeline and ui mocks. After 30+ commits trying to figureout how to add in the linter git workflow, I was able to learn how to modulate our ci pipeline through trial by fire (or hand grenade coding). Definitely not the best approach but an experience I don't think I'll forget.

• What can I do to improve:
  

  Working on communicating better with my teammates, listening, and surveying different options before committing.

• Inidividual morale:
  

  Feeling really good with the progress we've made so far :D

Jason

• What went well:
  

  This week we focused on documentation and CI/CD pipeline. We splitted our team into two sub teams and both teams were able to make progress quickly. We now have a working prod and dev web app set up.

• What I learned this week:
  

  I reviewed some of the concepts that I learned from CSE 110: User stories, user cases, etc.

• What can I do to improve:
  

  I will try to listen more and think about things more carefully before I propose changes.

• Inidividual morale:
  

  Pretty good, looking forward to get into coding/testing.