Sprint off-course retrospective

My sprints were initially suppose to be weekly, starting and finishing on a Monday. However on this sprint I had an off-site from Monday - Tuesday which blew me off-course a bit and so I kind of forgot about my sprint and it didn’t end until the 28th September (11 days).

Sprint begin : 17-09-18

Sprint end: 28-09-18

Happiness scale: 7.⁵⁄₁₀

Decease due to changing language and lots of changes to self-organisation in general. Good in the long run but slightly turbulent in the short.

Positive:

• Gave a lightning talk about my Masters’ thesis about ‘pharmaceuticals in wastewater affecting aquatic life’
• Started functional programming in Scala Coursesera course and completed the first assignment. Learnt tail recursion, found it quite a cool concept but hard to get my head around at first.
• Pair programming successful in cementing tail recursion principles
• Went on an offsite where my PPM team made a image-guessing game (learnt a lot about project creation in an agile manner) Off-site blog post

Negative:

• Not being able to focus my learning in Scala - too much to take in at once. Therefore changing languages to Haskell.
• Didn’t do the Git log exercise assigned to use, it was already don’t by another apprentice before I had the chance to look at it, so didn’t bother doing it int the end.
• Trying to include all the things from the self-assessment too quickly (trying to learn Vim, docker, bash).

General notes:

Towards the end of the week I decided to change languages because of the difficulty in being able to focus in such a multi-paradigm language which was heavily compared to java.

What I learned from last week is that I need to focus my learning to a topic at a time. And learn what is essential for now and build up, don’t get distracted by topics that are not important now.

So the next sprint will be increased to 2 week sprints and shall take place on a Tuesday rather than a Monday, therefore the sprint is more fresh for the retrospective.

The next week sprint shall concentrate on bash and Functional programming in Haskell.

Action items:

• Main action is too focus efforts on learning Haskell (aim to complete chapter 9 by the end of the sprint in order to to start a mini project the next sprint).
• Be more rigorous with agile implementation and create retrospectives with structure and post them on my blog.

• Increase Sprint duration to 2 weeks and to start and finish on a Tuesday.

• Research/Learn bash commands.