CAGD 370 - Blog Post Postmortem - 12/10/2023

    During these last few months, the rest of my team and I got to learn a lot about the development process, and we also got to get a little inside look at how the process works in the industry for those companies that use agile development. One of the biggest things that I noticed during the last few months of this semester was how important it was to keep on communicating with your team is, without proper communication from your lead the rest of the team might not know what is going on and if one of the other members ends up cutting communication and you do not see them all sprint someone may have to start doing their work. Luckily I had a great lead on this prototype and was always communicating with us on when our deadlines for certain aspects of the project needed to be finished and also when something that we sent to her to get checked it would either get pushed through or she would send it back in a timely manner with a comment on what went wrong and what specifically she was doing to get the certain bug to happen. Even if she could pinpoint exactly what she was doing to get the bug to pop up she would spend more time helping to find the series of events you might have to do to get it to happen. It was very nice having a lead that would check your work so often because even when I would send it to her very late at night to get checked, she would let you know almost first thing in the morning or as soon as she had time to check it out so you would know whether or not you would have to go back and fix it later. Personally, I think that we were also very organized with our Trello board, and I never had any trouble finding what cards I needed to do, and all of our cards were separated by person.

    Not everything can go perfectly though and so we did have some speed bumps throughout these months as well. It was every member in the group's first time doing agile development and so we did get a little confused on what we were supposed to do, the order of some things, and how long two weeks actually is and how long it would take us to do some things. The first couple of sprints we would assign ourselves the work we wanted to do but we were not sure how long each thing would take us so we would also have to ask for more work to be assigned. After a while we started to assign ourselves a good amount of work and it would last us almost the whole sprint so on the last day we would as for a few more cards to be assigned and after a while we ended up finding the right amount of work to not have any cards left in assigned, but turns out we were supposed to have cards left over and we were doing part of it right this whole time. Something else that went wrong is that we were having some GitHub problems during the first sprint, and it was only solved for the two of us throughout most of development on the prototype, and GitHub was only solved for the last member until the beginning of sprint four. That meant for every bit of work that one member did it would then have to be sent to the lead and then she would have to put it into the project. It doesn't seem like it would be that big of a deal but sometimes when the stuff was sent to her it would not work and we do not really know why.

    When I do agile development in the future, which would most likely be for another class, I would definitely make sure that we have the full plan or almost the entire plan for the project and what we want to do so that way there are no last-minute changes or additions to what we have because we think we might not meet the requirements. So then getting into what I would change if I could do it all again I would most definitely say to the team that we need to sit down and discuss our movement mechanic and whatever else we may want in the prototype, because after about sprint two some of the other prototypes that we were seeing did not have a movement mechanic and so they had to go back and rethink what they want to do while we already had one mechanic that we thought about doing. However after it was pointed out that some groups need to go back to the drawing board we kind of panicked because we thought our movement mechanic would not be enough so we went back and added more to the prototype that we probably could have gotten away with not having. In the end our prototype came out really cool and I am super proud of all the work we have put into this and it has been a great learning experience.