Nearing the End!

It’s been a while since I’ve updated my developer blog. Since my last post we started and ended our second sprint and we’re currently halfway through our third and final one! A lot of the user stories for this third sprint are continuations of the ones from last sprint as we all realized we didn’t have enough time to implement everything we needed to. In addition, I am working with Kyra to link up everyone’s pieces and create an app we can demo and package up for the end of the semester.

It being almost the end of our time in senior design, I felt like it would be a good time to talk about the challenges I’ve faced and the lesson’s I’ve learned this past semester. For one, this project showed me the importance of having defined roles and goals for each team member especially in a larger group of people. Once we began the coding portion of the project and everyone split into smaller teams focused on implementing a specific piece of the app, I felt like everyone was able to work more efficiently and independently. This was probably because we had a clearly defined goal we were focused on. Even if some of those goals were loftier than others, having a defined focus really helped our team work more efficiently.

And second, I learned how the agile methodology works in practice. Agile and scrum are things I had heard of from other CS students and felt like I understood pretty well. Actually having to write user stories and have stand ups and sprint planning meetings was another story though. Not that it was more difficult, just that it made me realize how much of the details I didn’t quite have a grasp on. At this point, I feel like I’ve earned the right to put “agile” in my list of skills on my resume and that I could somewhat easily jump into an agile team at a future company.