Sprint 1 Retrospective

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So last night I started thinking about sprint 1 and how it went, what I'd do differently etc. for the sprint retrospective. The biggest thing I learned is that there's no way I can put in as much time each week as I'd like to on the project. I would love to put in 20 hours per week but that's just not going to be possible while maintaining my sanity. The biggest problem is that weeknights quickly get crowded, so I can really only get in a half-hour here or an hour there M-F. As such I need to concentrate on getting a lot done on the weekends. I'm going to start designating one day per weekend as a project day and do no other activities on that day. This should help a lot, I hope.

 The main thing I will be sure to do differently is to set up the demo much earlier. I waited until Sunday night and then ran out of time. Next time I'll set it up in the morning/early afternoon of my designated project day in case something goes wrong. I'll officially end my sprint before I set up the demo (Friday or Saturday night I suppose). I can do a retrospective and planning meeting without meeting with my professor, I think, since really I'm pretty much determining what to do right now. So I'll do those on the  night of the project day, and if I get any actual work done after that it will count as part of the next sprint.

 The actual work went ok, it was simply a matter of time. And my estimations weren't as horrible as I thought they'd be. I finished the tickets "Restrict access to the HSQLDB to the server on which it is running" in 2 hours and "Change the way passwords are stored and transmitted so that they are encrypted" in 6 hours. Much of the time for both tickets consisted of research. I started on "Add logging and propagate exceptions instead of swallowing them" but was unable to finish completely; in retrospect I should've split this into "Set up logging" and "Insert logging code where necessary". Setting up logging is complete, so I'll create a new ticket for inserting logging code and do that for the next sprint. I will also be attempting a smaller, hopefully more realistic, amount of ideal man hours for the next sprint.

 The final issue I had is that I didn't do well at all on keeping track of the the work left for the burndown chart. Basically I kept forgetting. So I'll make sure to actually track that for the next sprint.

 So the summary is I'll try and get a better schedule set up for working on the project, be more realistic about how much I can work on it, keep track of the work left on tickets and update the burndown chart every day, and procrastinate less when setting up the demo. 

Just for grins, here's my burndown chart, though it's pretty badly inaccurate and contains a lot of guesswork:
 

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