Sprint 2 Retrospective:

This sprint ran more smoothly than Sprint 1 did. As a result of having obtained a more detailed specification by coordinating with the goals laid out by Dr. Burge from Nassau Community College and having obtained a better understanding of the individual skill-sets of our team members, we were able to produce an OpenAPI specification [1] that defined 8 of the 9 requested endpoint definitions. The yaml file containing these definitions was then used to write, build, and test these endpoints in our back-end container. These methods were then tested internally within the container by using the Visual Studio Code environment to launch HTTP requests from 2 files (guest.http [2] and qs.http) [3]. “Swagger UI” was used as a VSCode extension to facilitate this process.

It was easier this sprint to distribute work among the team, because the Open-API spec was available shortly after the start of the sprint, enabling back-end code to be written and unit tested. As testing progressed, we would modify the spec as we made changes to the back-end code to fix bugs.

Although we did a better job at keeping the Git-lab Epics [4] and Issues boards [5] properly in place than in the prior sprint, this may have been the weakest area of our efforts. Our intention is to improve the ongoing modification of this Scrum material as we progress to sprint 3.

We improved our use and efficiency of GIT to Git-Lab coordination, were able to build semantic versioning, checked the structure of the Open-API definition with Swagger Preview, and started looking into using a secure key. This key will be coordinated as a priority in the sprint 3 effort through communication with the IAM team.

I was able to set up a clone a version of the NEST Android application [6] with the intention of doing system testing of the REST API. By using Android Studio, my prior knowledge of Android development with Java, and the help of a guiding YouTube video, along with general help from stackoverflow.com community, I was able to write 6 classes in an isolated namespace to the project. This code uses an android library call Volley to facilitate REST API development. This code launches an activity from the main NEST activity which allows the user to make requests to the remote back-end MongoDB database, and returns responses, which are then displayed in a scroll-able text view component.

The layout used by this activity used a relatively new UI component called a Constraint Layout, which improves the efficiency and maintainability of its XML code with the support of a sophisticated design tool allowing “drag and drop” of components, allowing them to effectively present a user interface which will scale properly over the hundreds of different android devices, all with different screen resolutions, aspect ratios, and device sizes.

The system testing was burdened by the fact that calls from Android were producing a Timeout Error on every attempt. With the help of Dr. Wurst, I am in a better position to get these calls working by the first week of the upcoming sprint.

I was impressed with this sprint, because our team accomplished the 2 main goals of this classroom effort, the first being to improve the skill-set of the team members in a “real world” development effort, and secondly, to help with the general progress of the LibreFoodPantry [7] work to produce a product to help those less fortunate than ourselves.

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Published by Joe Barry