Whew! That first project sprint is complete and there’s a little breathing room before the next spring officially starts (after Homework 2 is due). I’ll be working as quickly as possible to provide feedback on – and possibly merge – the open pull requests so you have some idea where things stand before the “soft” deadline for the next specification in a couple of weeks.

I noticed this morning that some teams did not submit their retrospective notes via Blackboard per the submission instructions. If that’s the case, someone from your team should make that submission as soon as possible (i.e., today).

I’m very proud of the teams that had one or more of their pull requests accepted. For those that didn’t, you would have missed a release deadline in the real world. You need to start thinking now about the upcoming sprint and what you’re going to do. In some cases, it will be trivial to address the feedback on the pull request and have it merged; if that’s the case, don’t delay – keep working on it during the next week! In other cases, though, you might need to take the code that you’ve written and significantly restructure it. It isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you need to deviate from your initial plan; for example, if your current code is a long way from being approved, then the worst thing you can do is add new features – all you’re going to do is make it more difficult to merge anything. Feel free to schedule a meeting with me if you’d like to talk over the next steps.

Remember that the goal of the project is to show you how professional software is developed. Yes, all the reviews and the requests for changes are a pain sometimes, but in the long run your design and development skills should improve, making you a better software engineer who writes high-quality code as quickly as others who are just trying to get something working.