Sprint 1 Retrospective

In this post, I’ll be reflecting on my group’s first sprint towards developing an Identity Access Management System for Thea’s Pantry. Our focus in Sprint 1 was really to get a base understanding of Keycloak and to implement a basic framework that would allow us to integrate Keycloak with the pre-existing systems.


Some of my personal work towards that goal was as follows:

GitLab

  • Documenting our low-level issues in GitLab and assigning them accordingly. Epic

Backend

Frontend

  • Containerize the fake frontend in a way that allows it to interact with the backend for testing purposes. Containerization

  • Create a dummy frontend with buttons that send mock JWTs to the new backend endpoint for testing purposes. This frontend sends encoded JWTs that contain user roles, receives the encoded role from the backend, and redirects to one of three corresponding landing pages accordingly. Commits: 1 , 2


We got off to a relatively slow start, but this was to be expected in learning a fully new technology. None of us had prior experience with Keycloak, so brainstorming and researching how we might want to implement an authentication / IAM flow was not easy. After some initial barriers, something that worked incredibly well for us was taking the extra time to really break down the work into very small issues or tasks for an individual to do. It was a lot easier to “add an endpoint to the openapi.yaml file” and “create openapi schemas for authentication tokens” than to “create a fake backend that can handle token validation”. Breaking things down as a group really helped us isolate specific tasks with clear deliverables.


Something that didn’t work quite as well for us was our current working agreement. I feel strongly that our working agreement must either be modified heavily or adhered to with more focus. We could take some time to more clearly outline the expectations of each member of the group, which in turn will give us something to reference when we have feedback for each other. We can also improve our communication as a team; our Discord is relatively inactive, and it would benefit us greatly if we each contributed more to the Discord.


Something I could personally improve is my followership. Though we are obviously a team and all working together, a deliberate part of the exercise is to designate a Scrum Master for the sprint and to loosely follow the Scrum framework. I was not the Scrum Master for Sprint 1, and I have a tendency to step up into a leadership role when the opportunity presents itself or when I feel there is something I am able to contribute that is not already present. I think this has its place and value, but I think it is also detrimental in some ways to both the team (as it weakens the team structure) and to the individual designated as Scrum Master (as it removes the opportunity for him or her to lead). I can definitely work on being a follower when it is my turn to be a follower.


The pattern from the book that I’ve chosen to include here is Exposing Your Ignorance. The pattern describes how we all like to be seen as confident and competent and are therefore slow to ask for help when we need it, but the better way forward is to admit our inadequacies and put in the open all of our missing knowledge, as that is a quicker, more effective, and more honest way to deliver. I selected this pattern because I feel it would have been extremely useful to our group throughout the sprint; there were many instances where I felt we each should have asked for more help if we needed it, and instead we tended towards remaining silent so as not to admit that we were lost, even if that meant not completing the work we needed to. I strongly disagree with that method of tackling a problem, and I feel that if we had read this pattern, we may have been much quicker to admit to each other that we need help with X, Y, or Z.

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