During this sprint there were two big experiments, the first is trying out controllers instead of hand tracking. I have written separate articles on that. One and two. This article will focus on the second change and that is that I took on the role of solo programmer.
In the previous sprints Scott and I did all the programming work together and it felt a lot like we needed a third person. We felt that there was too much programming to do for two people. The teachers said that maybe Ebru and Frederique should learn programming too and can take some workload off of us. I was against this idea, and I do not mean this in a bad way, but I was thinking that it would only make our workload more. This was because they would need a lot of help from us and take a lot of time doing things we could do really quickly.
I heard from Ebru that she talked to another group and they actually only had one programmer. This got me thinking and I proposed that we would do the same. I would be the only programmer in our group for sprint 3 and we tried that out. I thought this because that would put a bit more pressure on that one person and that person wouldn’t need to divide the work. Also, I could then ask any questions I had to Scott instead of us both having trouble and needing a third person.
Reflection
We did this and it worked out great. I think this is one of the reasons that we had so much more work done this sprint. It also made me feel like I contributed way more than before and I could focus on it a lot better. This is definitely something we will take with us during the rest of the project.