Introduction
This trimester in AP Computer Science Principles (AP CSP), I had the opportunity to work in a Scrum team with five other students, unlike last trimester which I worked with 3 other students. Our team of 6 was technically two teams of 3, and I was in a group with Aranya and Abby. Aranya was our assistant scrum master and Abby and I were both coders.
My Role in the Team
As a coder in the team, my responsibilities included:
- Writing and debugging code for our project.
- Collaborating with teammates to integrate features.
- Reviewing pull requests and providing feedback.
As mentioned before, although we were a team of three, I wanted to focus on the collaboration aspect of our team. Therefore, I encouraged communication even though I wasn’t a scrum or assistant scrum master. This brought about positive changes in our group dynamic, with more progress that was shown in both our website and grades.
Key Takeaways
- Effective Communication is Crucial: Frequent in depth communication with planning is the most important factor in the success of a group.
- Never assume that others know what you’re doing: Constant clarification is needed, and we shouldn’t judge each other for not being able to keep track of each other’s code and features. There’s a reason we communicate through slack and have burndown lists in our Kanban Board.
- Iterative Development Works Best: Breaking tasks into smaller sprints made our project manageable and improved overall quality. If I was told that I would be creating a social media site in 12 weeks, I would feel overtaken by such a large task. However, because we had split our project into parts that built upon each other, I was able to manage it much better and see the progress I was making. I was also able to improve on things that I had been working on as I worked on new parts of my feature.