Agile Software Development - Scrum

Hello there! It is finally the end of Gastronome’s Android application development. It has been a fruitful 16 weeks projects with my team and I have learnt a lot of skills and knowledge from them. More importantly, my team and I have practiced the Agile Methodology using Scrum everyday with the use of daily stand-ups, sprint planning as well as sprint reviews. As this is my first project using the Scrum methodology, I was unfamiliar with how the sprint planning and daily stand-up actually felt like and was rather uncomfortable with them at the start of the project. However, after the course of 16 weeks with 4 sprints planning and 4 sprint reviews, I got used to them and it was rather enjoyable writing user stories and doing planning poker with the team.

Sprint Planning

For our first Sprint planning, after the planning poker phase, my team and I have planned for a total of 30 points to complete after the end of the first sprint. However, at the end of the sprint, my team and I only hit 25 points and was 2 user story away from our goal. My lecturer then told my team to lower our story points to 25 next sprint and try to complete all the user stories in the next sprint.

Hence, after reducing our story points, my team and I were even more motivated than before and managed to complete all our tasks in the second sprint. What I gained most from the various sprint planning are that I learnt the importance of prioritizing which features to work on first as a team and the importance of being highly motivated working in the Agile methodology.

Daily Stand-up

As this was a 16 weeks long project, there were countless amount of daily stand-up my team and I had to do. I remembered the first daily stand-up meeting with my lecturer where I was uncomfortable presenting what I did the previous day as I usually did not have to present small little things such as "I coded the add button yesterday". Instead, I was more used to presenting a complete project. Hence, after many daily stand-up with the team and lecturers, I felt more comfortable sharing what I have done, what am I going to today as well as problems I faced when developing, and now I can communicate better with a team and team mates will know whenever I faced a problem and would help me if they have a solution for me.

Sprint Review

For our very first sprint review, my lecturer and my team conducted the Sprint Retrospective where we discussed about what went well during the sprint, what problems we ran into and how those problems were solved. From the discussion, my team got to understand better the obstacles each person in the team were facing and in the Sprint 2, we managed to help one another as one's flaw is another one's strength. For example, as Kevin was implementing Fragments instead of activity where I was familiar with, In the Sprint Review, I mentioned that I was unsure how does fragment works and how to actually implement it. Then, after class, Kevin approached me and taught me how to implement Fragments and hence in the following sprint I was able to build the application more efficiently as I did not have to spend extra time and effort figuring out how does fragment actually work.

Conclusion

To conclude, this project has really been a fruitful experience for me as I managed to worked with individuals that have strengths and skills which I did not have. One example is working with Wan Ning which was the UI / UX Designer of the team. Working with a designer was an eye-opener for me as I had to ensure that the application is able to display information and data just as how the UI is designed by her.

Although this marks the end of the Portfolio 2 module, my team and I still hopes to continue to work on developing Gastronome, developing additional features and the end goal is to publish the application to Play Store.