The team was great when It came to decision making for what tasks we selected, when we worked on them, and In what capacity Emily & I would be working together. Emily and I decided early on that paired programming, an Agile Software Development technique would be the best approach, and it proved successful throughout the Internship. Paired programming served as a powerful tool that allowed us to increase our efficiency and deepen our knowledge of each story we picked up. When It came to selecting new tickets, the team kept in mind our our capacity limit for each sprint and offered up suggestions on which tickets would be the best suited to our skill level and Interests. We also found that the estimated story point value was usually higher than the time spent working on it. I found this to be a positive because It allowed us to frequently pull stories forward from future sprints or focus on other commitments outside the Internship.

Additionally, looking back at the past retrospectives for the Unified Workflow Team, It was clear that Fredrick did a great job of blocking external distractors from the team. This allowed Emily and I to focus on the current sprint and experience the whole process of development Including merging a Pull Request.

What Could Be Improved

When picking up new stories, Emily and I continuously needed a brief overview of the task we would be working on. We found we had a bunch of starting questions such as 'what does the Input look like?', 'what does the output look like?', and 'what files should be using to accomplish this task?' As new developers coming onto the team, I don't think these answers were as Intuitive to us as seasoned developers. I believe we potentially could've made more initial progress on a story before needing further clarification If the questions above were covered In the acceptance criteria explicitly.

Again, as being new developers I feel as though we took on a 'spend X time struggling' mentality. We felt that If we hadn't spent at least X time looking at a story and trying to fully understand, or attempt to fix our code with no success that we shouldn't reach out to the team for help. This Idea directly resulted in limiting our time in Sprint 6.5, which we noted in the retrospective on what could've gone better.

Thank you

Thank you to the Unified Workflow Team for their continued guidance and support throughout this opportunity to work with the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. I greatly appreciate every member of the team for helping me along the way and those who are providing me with assistance on the next step in my career.

To Professor Stade, thank you for selecting me to take part in this amazing opportunity. I appreciate the chance to further my Software Developer skills In a real-world setting.

To Christina, thank you for your continued support throughout my time on the Unified Workflow Team. You always greeted us with words of encouragement, making me feel like part of the team instantaneously. Your confidence In my abilities as a programmer has been a big motivator and will be something I take with me as I continue to progressive as a Software Engineer. Thank you for being an incredible mentor, guiding me both professionally and personally.