My Retrospective on Working for The ASR Team

Last Day of Work

Today, I finished my student work at Academic Support Resources (ASR) Custom Solutions where I worked as a web developer for a year. Due to the pandemic, everything was done remotely. There are so many things that I learned by working with professional developers and I want to write down some of them.

Agile Methodology

The Agile way of work was something that I would always hear about, but I was never involved with. According to Atlassian, it is “an iterative approach to project management and software development that helps teams deliver value to their customers faster and with fewer headaches.” - What is Agile?

The team used the Scrum framework and this was also something that I was never exposed to before. The team worked based on sprints and had regular meetings to do weekly retrospectives. Also, there were regular weekly meetings with our customers to show what we had at the moment and listen to their opinions on the implementations of ongoing projects.

Pair Programming - What is Pair Programming?

Whenever I worked, the majority of the time, I got to pair-program with other developers! At first, I was very nervous and was very worried because I lacked experience and knowledge in web development. However, soon I realized that pair programming can be very beneficial to a developer with less experience or skills (which is me).

Benefits that I got from pair programmings are:

1. I was able to ask a lot of questions! I think this is the most beneficial thing about pair programming. Not only did it take much less to find out about an answer, but also the answers were very precise and high quality. This led me to write better code that followed good practices.
2. Sometimes it is not always about writing code. When pair programming with others, there are many things to consider. One of the things is that you have to be able to respect others’ time. There can be time conflicts when you want to work with someone. Or, you pair-program for too long without any break time. These are the things that must be considered when working with others (not just when pair programming).
3. As mentioned above, it isn’t all about coding - you have to be able to listen too. I tended to cut off when someone was talking. However, others would wait until I finished and then spoke. As mentioned above, I had many questions. But, I also realized that I could have waited until my co-workers finished their talks.

Working with Customers

Having a regular meeting schedule helped us work on the web application a lot. Being able to update on the work progress and get feedback frequently definitely prevented us from going in the wrong direction. And we didn’t have to worry about scheduling for meetings as the times were fixed and it only required a short period of time.

So…

These are the major benefits/lessons that I got from working in an environment that the ASR team pursued. Obviously, the team was small - we had about eight developers plus two student developers. So the Agile way of working could work perfectly for the team in my opinion. There are definitely more things (retrospective, professional development time) that I can write about my experience and I will try to add them in the future. What a year I had with the team! I was very lucky to be a part of the team and was glad to help the team and the school community that I belonged to.

Thanks for reading!