Sprint 3 Retrospective

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Sprint 3 is now complete. It went fairly well, although again I had trouble finding time to work on the project. There were some other frustrations which I'll detail below. I finished 3 backlog items: Run automated tools e.g. FindBugs to ensure code is correct and clean (8 hours), Write a shell script or similar to start the database server and tomcat (1 hour), and Fix the build.xml to only copy the correct jars to the web app's lib directory (15 minutes). Then there was the stuff I worked on a lot and didn't get done...

I started on both Restrict the login page to only allow access via SSL and Fix the email notification system so that it works with the CS department email settings. For the former, I got SSL redirection working if the user navigates directly to the login page (e.g. http://localhost:8080/ProjectManagementSystem/login.html) but despite my best efforts I couldn't figure out how to get it to redirect if the user goes to the root of the web app (http://localhost:8080/ProjectManagementSystem). I posted on StackOverflow days ago and still haven't gotten any comments or answers, so I'm not sure what to do at this point.

For the latter, I did discover what the trouble is with sending email alerts using the CS department's email system. Unfortunately I really need to consult with my professor before I can resolve this, and since I didn't get to it until this weekend I decided to wait until I see him tomorrow to discuss it; I doubt he'd be checking email this weekend. Basically authorization is required to send email, but since the department uses a self-signed certificate, Java doesn't recognize it and throws an error. The most correct way to remedy this would be to add the certificate to Java's trust store, but that requires admin access which I obviously don't have. So I need to find out if I should implement the workaround of temporarily storing the certificate (which will take a lot more effort) or accepting all certificates (not good for obvious reasons) or if the prof would like to add the certificate to the trust store on the machine where he'll be running my project or something else altogether.

The only backlog item I didn't work on at all was Move properties out of the session so that users can do things like have multiple browser windows open and bookmark pages, which I probably need to re-estimate; upon further reflection this will require rewriting the entire database access class (which it does desperately need) and that will probably take more than just 8 hours.

I'm not going to do sprint planning tonight, as I need to discuss these issues with my professor and prioritize in general for the next sprint.

Here's my burndown chart (subtract 10 off all numbers on the y axis; I wasn't paying attention when I drew that...):


I'm really hoping I can work on the project more evenly for the next two weeks so I can get more work done. Here's hoping...

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