Week 6 Retrospectives

Group Status Report

Status

Morale

Inidividual Status Reports

Alberto

• What went well:
  

  We created a timeline for the coming weeks of development which helped us put things into perspective. We started developing. I also really enjoyed the Among Us session with Team 3.

• What I learned this week:
  

  It is extremely important to have a timeline covering the whole development cycle so that everyone has an idea of what's coming. It is also great for coming up with clear meeting agendas.

• What can I do to improve:
  

  Each individual coding task should be split into coding, testing and documentation. Also, documentation is more of a guideline but one should be open to revisit it.

• Inidividual morale:
  

  Feeling a lot more confident about planning for the success of the app now that we have a timeline. I am also very confident as I realize more and more that everyone on the team is very competent, willing to work, and willing to learn when it is needed.

Alex

• What went well:
  

  This week, I think we did a good job separating tasks and self-organizing in starting to code up our MVP and beef up our documentation. We mostly completed coding up user login, and made some progress on 1:1 messaging. We also refined our student tutorials and made screen sequence diagrams and a database schema diagram. I'm impressed with how motivated to work and accountable everyone is.

• What I learned this week:
  

  This week was my introduction to databases, so it was interesting seeing one for the first time, understanding how it's set up, and learning new terminology like "collections" and "documents." Secondly, I learned about mocking for the first time this week, though I still don't understand it well. Related to this, I learned just how difficult it is to figure out how to mock React Firebase hooks. I'm starting to see how the design of a React component might really influence how you write your tests or constrain the types of tests that you can write. Lastly, I learned about story points and Planning Poker (which we even played in our meeting!).

• What can I do to improve:
  

  I think I can benefit a great deal from learning from how other group members wrote unit tests that incorporated mocking. As I review the new code that implements user login, I'll also be taking stock of how they were able to implement their tests. Looking closely at the rest of the code will also hopefully help me understand more about React and how to go about adding on top of this work to implement 1:1 messaging.

• Inidividual morale:
  

  This week, my morale is pretty poor. I feel that I put in a significant amount of time into the project this week, but I'm pretty disappointed by my technical performance. Despite feeling very inadequate and unhelpful, I'm not sure what other steps I could be taking to address my technical gaps and thus slower work pace. I'm okay if I work slower independently, but I feel terribly guilty when someone is stuck working with me, because it's difficult for me to author code on the spot when I'm still trying to understand what an example snippet of React code is doing or what it means to mock a function. I do some light research on React/testing before pair programming, but it doesn't seem to help the issue, and I fear that other group members may view me (in the moment) as choosing to be a bystander, which could reasonably frustrate someone.

Chang

• What went well:
  

  This week we started to write code. We finished User Case 1 and 2. Now we can log in via Google Account and sign up in our app.

• What I learned this week:
  

  I learned how to mock and test using jest. Firebase is a complex library and it is hard to mock functions in it. We separated each component and wrote different tests for Login and CreateUser.

• What can I do to improve:
  

  Look through the testing code and learn how to write a mock function.

• Inidividual morale:
  

  Everything is great now.

Dian

• What went well:
  

  We finished implementing the first and the second core functionality of our app, which are user login and user creation. We did spend a lot of time setting up the firebase and writing test cases using jest. It was a great learning experience.

• What I learned this week:
  

  I learned how to mock different user actions using jest library. I also learned that VS code has an extension to live-stream with other people so that we can code together, but it does have some sync issue that will mess up with the file.

• What can I do to improve:
  

  I should do more coding even I do not really know React/JS. I should do more research on jest and help my teammates more. I will also need to spend some more time making the documentations better.

• Inidividual morale:
  

  I believe we are on track, or even ahead of other teams. But I cannot be too excited about that so that I will get lazy doing the project. I will keep up the good work and continue implementing new features.

Edward

• What went well:
  

  We were able to follow a few tutorials on how to start up a React chat app with firebase! It was pretty fun and exciting getting an MVP out for the messaging service.

• What I learned this week:
  

  This was my first time ever using React! Having only done frontend development in native JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, I would highly recommend putting in the time to additionally learn React. The components are easy to manage and makes the code a lot less verbose. On the hand, I also learned that testing Firebase with Jest is a really huge pain. The framework definitely has a bit of a learning curve and prior experience with mocking made it easier to understand.

• What can I do to improve:
  

  I should pick up the pace a little bit more, since I don't have the best base knowledge in these technologies.

• Inidividual morale:
  

  Little bit better at time management!

Jason

• What went well:
  

  This week, we officially started coding. So we are moving on track and is making progress.

• What I learned this week:
  

  I learned more about jest mocking (espcially on firebase), it's tricky and fun because there isn't many resources available.

• What can I do to improve:
  

  I will follow up with my PR and making sure it's getting reviewed.

• Inidividual morale:
  

  So far so good, looking forward to finish the project early and strong!