This sprint posed a few challenges which I am not confident we will be able to solve by the end of the semester. While I am and I am willing to bet my team members would agree with me that we all have made good progress through the semester, however two major snags hit our project that will be difficult to solve given the time we had left.
At the beginning of the sprint, we were collaborating with the team who was working on the server, and they hit a significant issue when we found out that they weren’t able to make calls to the main server. For some reason, when they tried to access the server URL’s, they weren’t getting any data back from the server, but just a never ending stream of URL text return values. Without an ability to connect to their server, we won’t be able to integrate our component with the rest of the class.
While this snag would not directly impede our group in the progress of developing our component, we also hit another wall which I don’t have the faintest idea about the cause. When myself and my other teammates have our project forked onto our computers, and we run the application, we see exactly the component the way that we made it. However, when we tried to have a different team clone our component and run it, the output they saw was completely different. At the moment, I am not sure if that is an issue with dependencies on our end, or if the other team had a problem with forking our repository. This hindrance is by far the more significant problem because it affects the integrity of our component.
By the end of the sprint, our team decided that the best course of action was to improve as best as we can the usability errors, and to create a minimum viable product which we can use for our presentation. Given the multiple unexpected set backs, I will be happy creating a prototype component that is clear enough to understand so that we can pass it off to future students working on our component who will be able to focus solely on the integration with other teams’ components.
Although this sprint was definitely an exercise in patience and a refresher course in Murphy’s law, we definitely are continuing our march of progress regardless. As far as our component goes, we only have to throw on a few more bells and whistles to have a product which I can say for myself and with some degree of confidence for the rest of my team that we are happy with. I definitely expect set backs like this to be a common part of the job description. After all, nothing happens in a vacuum, and for every perfect plan there is a perfect failure.
At this point we are preparing for our final sprint, and getting ready for our final presentation. I’m sure that during our next sprint planning meeting tomorrow we will be beginning the process of wrapping up.
Bit by Bit 