Looking back on my experience in the Computer Science Capstone course, the timeline and work load were both very accommodating. Dividing the project into week-long sprints gave sufficient time to coordinate with our teammates and deal with all the issues of working asynchronously and over long distances. I felt like I gained experience dealing with a lot of obstacles I will likely encounter in the work place.
I also appreciated the flexibility in structuring the planning and organizational methods we implemented in our teams. This allowed us to try out a few different methods and ultimately use what worked best for our team. Clear guidelines in the project requirements also made it much easier to picture our final product and write a fairly accurate project plan right fro the get-go.
I was at first uncertain whether I would find the weekly stand up meetings useful, but I grew to appreciate them by the end. The asynchronous model was simple, straightforward, and more useful than an actual in-person meeting. Having it saved as a discussion made it easy to go back and check everyone’s progress and goals for the week. Writing out my accomplishments once a week was an excellent exercise. It helped me to see anything I was behind on and it was nice to reflect on what I did accomplish. This last week it helped me realize that I actually accomplished a lot more than I had hoped for the previous week.
I also appreciated the regular list of interesting blogs. Reading others’ tech blogs provided insight into writing my own and also into what interests me in the technical articles I read. I even learned about aspects of my favorite languages that I hadn’t considered before.
This course was definitely a positive experience and has been a real motivator in tackling more of my own personal projects in the future.
