In interviews, you'll be asked about how you approach working in projects, and being able to describe how you utilize agile processes is a great way to help you stand out as a junior developer candidate. This reflection is meant to help you develop this skill.
With that in mind, please answer the following questions in your own gist about your group project:
Waterfall is really not the most efficient or even feasible way to approach software projects. Waterfall is a great way to find out that there is something wrong with your project, whether that be bugs, missing crucial data, or even just not being something a consumer wants anymore, way too late in the process to really be able to do much about it. Agile is more about the smaller wins, and attacking a project in small but cumulative phases. In the case of our most recent project, it helped us especially approaching check-ins. Once a smaller but vital core piece of functionality was completed, we could move onto the next. If we'd been using waterfall, we probably wouldn't have found a lot of the issues we came across until it was too late.
How did you and your group approach project management in this project (what tools did you use, how did you hold each other accountable, etc.)?
We made a project page attached to our repo on Github. At the beginning we were pretty good about using it, but that fell apart about midway through the project. Unfortunately we had some accountability issues as well. Group members would say they were going to tackle a piece of functionality and it did not come to fruition, nor was it communicated that they were struggling or unable to complete their task.
I did a lot of mediating in this project, unfortunately. Two group members tended to butt heads a lot and I felt I had to try and smooth out the issues to facilitate some sort of compromise. Being a not naturally organized person, I tried to keep us on track to figure out what goals we wanted to accomplish each day, but that didn't always happen. About halfway through the project I felt a bit more of a leadership role, especially as I started feeling more comfortable with the code.
I'd like to find a way to nip personality differences and conflict in the bud. I feel like we wasted a lot of time with interpersonal problems rather than actually working. I would also like to continue working on being more organized and intentional with what I plan to accomplish each day, and setting a struggle timer. I need to ask for help sooner than I do.
It's a good scheduled check in with team members. I think it's important to address what is going well and what's not. However, going from retro to implementation seems to be a struggle.
In your team retro, how did you engage in the feedback process? What principles of feedback did you use in these conversations?
We focused on not using "I feel" and rather used "I think." We also were mindful of addressing positives and negatives and expressing appreciation towards each other for our accomplishments and contributions, and being specific with what we were trying to say. I don't feel anyone was aggressive in their critique or feedback; however, our group did suffer from some passive aggressive tendencies.
How would you describe your ability to communicate feedback? How has this experience affected your communication skills? How do you want to improve in your ability to communicate feedback?
I definitely am not good at saying what I'm really thinking, especially when it comes to any sort of "negative" feedback. I internalize issues and therefore am not great at telling my partner(s) what I need. This is something I plan to continue working on. In my prior project I got more comfortable with it (probably because it was just a paired project) but since we were already navigating rocky group dynamics, I opted to keep my issues to myself. I need to continue working on finding a happy medium with this.
I really appreciate all the thorough details here as you talked through your process. I also appreciate the level of awareness you have here on articulating where your group struggled, and you have some good lessons learned here. I'm happy to help talk through strategies for future groups that might not be able to move out of the storming phase very effectively, just let me know!