Our first sprint was an introductory one where our team officially organized on GitHub and Slack, created local working copies of Ampath’s application, and began looking at Angular resources.
Our team worked well throughout this sprint, despite not having all members present for 1/2 of our in-person meetings. The required tasks included in this sprint’s back-log were fairly easy to complete, but I did run in to some trouble during the installation of the application’s dependencies. I was absent for the first meeting following our sprint-planning-meeting, but all of my teammates were extremely helpful in getting my application compiled and running at the following meeting; they each gave me a different piece of advice and the combination of those pieces of advice was instrumental in the completion of this task. I also received some help from Shane R. who is on one of the other development teams.
We began the sprint by organizing on GitHub so that we could create a working copy of Ampath’s application that would be at our team’s disposal, that we could then clone into local working copies on our individual machines. We then organized on Slack so that we had a direct means of communication between the members of our team and with our professor. Finally, we organized on Trello so that we could set up product and sprint back-logs to keep track of what has been and needs to be done.
The next task we had to complete for the sprint was to install the application and its dependencies on each of our machines. Everybody had a little trouble at first but my troubles persisted right up until the last day of the sprint. After quite a bit of trial and error, I realized a couple mistakes I was making in the installation process. Apparently, the package-lock.json file in the application’s main directory was having some effect on the success of its compilation, so I had to delete it. The second mistake I made, was that I was doing all of the installation in Git Bash instead of WebStorm’s built-in terminal. I had attempted installing the application’s dependencies using Git Bash for the first 4 or 5 attempts and got the same compilation error at the end of each attempt. Finally, by using WebCharm’s built-in terminal to install the application’s dependencies, I was able to successfully compile the application and run it, thus completing all the tasks required of me on the sprint back-log.
My installation process summed up:
Clone application to PC
Delete the package-lock.json file
Open application in WebCharm
Using WebCharm’s terminal, follow directions to install dependencies and update software (found in README file)
Get Google Chrome extension for ability to log into the app (also mentioned in README file)
So, it was a fairly simple and straight-forward sprint, this time. I think the main piece of knowledge that I took away was, kind of, how developers are able to contribute to open-source applications using GitHub and, overall, how a development team organizes to contribute to such a project of this size and magnitude. I can now apply this knowledge if I am ever offered an opportunity to work on an open-source application that I am interested in, or if I ever want to form a development team that utilizes the Scrum style of development.
