Shambling Towards Perfection

The goal for sprint 6 is to finish rewriting the application, and to fix and prevent bugs and handle errors gracefully. There are quite a few items left from last time, so those are: Page Points Task 4 New User 1 New Task 1 New File Link 1 New Comment 1 Blocking Tasks 3 Most Recent Tasks 3 Unfinished Tasks 3 This adds up to 17 ideal man hours, which is a little low (hopefully; I like to try and stay optimistic!), so I want to add in a few more items to the sprint backlog. They are: Priority Description Points 510 Fix a bug with navigating to the projects page 0 (5 mins) 500 Fix the login error that occurs when the username doesn't exist in the user table 2 470 Wrap create statements and the fetching of the ID in one database transaction to prevent incorrect results 2 450 Update the application to handle errors nicely 5 This is another 9 hours, which brings us up to 28. I'm ever the optimist, so hopefully this will be the sprint where this is actually succes...

Yesterday I met with my professor for a demo of the pieces I had working; he was satisfied with it. Then we discussed my plans for the next sprint and through to the beginning of next semester. During the next sprint, I intend to get the entire application running again at the very least. I'm also hoping to start on the list of new features (discussed below) that I'd like to explore; my adviser was open to me doing any/all of them, although as he put it they're really for my own personal development/education rather than requirements from him. Of course the entire project is pretty much an exercise in personal development, since I already know how to make working software, but anyway. My goal with the project is to make an application that's as professional as possible, so I want to include some of the bells and whistles you'd normally expect from a commercial application. This includes things like resetting a forgotten password, locking an account after too many...

So on Sunday I finished sprint 5. It went fairly well, although I didn't have as much time as I like, despite it being a 3 week long sprint. I was out of town for 4 days, plus there was that whole Thanksgiving thing, so it came out to be more like 2 weeks after all. Considering the amount of time I had, I think it went ok. There were a few oddities and bumps in the road. First, I was highly annoyed when I discovered that in JDBC the table name/alias isn't included in ResultSet column names . Instead, you have to alias the actual column if you need to distinguish between column names in the result. Grr. Second, I discovered that it's really kind of a pain to call static methods using JSTL .  Since I use static methods in virtually every JSP to format the output for HTML/links/etc. to ensure user input doesn't do whacky things, this is a problem. For now I'm putting off rewriting the JSPs to use JSTL, because I'll have to write custom EL functions and maybe tw...

The goal for sprint 5 is the same as for sprint 4: to improve the database access code and the JSPs, as well as move Objects from the Session to the Request. The sprint backlog items, however, have changed substantially. For all of the following pages in the web-app, I need to rewrite the JSP and rewrite the servlet code; some of them have had their database code rewritten already but for the parts I didn't complete during the last sprint, I also need to rewrite the database code. These are really all at the same priority level, so I'm not bothering to give them a rating. Page Points Users 1 User 2 Task 4 Projects 2 Project 3 New User 1 New Task 1 New Project 1 New File Link 1 New Comment 1 Instructors 1 Application Configuration 1 Blocking Tasks 3 Most Recent Tasks 3 Unfinished Tasks 3 The total points for this is 28, so I think it should be do-able in 3 weeks.

I met with my professor on Monday and luckily he was very understanding about the lack of visible progress this sprint. I wasn't able to demo the entire system, only a few command-line tools to prove that what I did get done is actually working. But he was fine with my progress anyhow. We discussed when we would next meet, and decided that (since I'm crazy busy this week and will be out of town for a few days, as well) we'll meet the Monday after Thanksgiving. So this will be a 3 week sprint. I intend to push hard to finish this rewrite; since I will have a 5 day weekend for Thanksgiving I think it's do-able. This is the beginning of the end for the basic functionality of the system. I should be done by the beginning of the spring semester, leaving revising the UI and the paper as the main things to accomplish next semester. The paper shouldn't be much of a problem; I'm a pretty fast writer and way back in high school I was actually better at English than mo...

Sprint 4 is over. It was somewhat of a disaster. I completely and utterly underestimated the amount of time it would take me to rewrite the data access layer, application layer, and presentation layer. In retrospect it was insane to think it'd go that fast; this is a rewrite of almost the entire project, which I originally created over the course of 3 months. Whoops. Anyway I got through parts of the data access layer rewrite, and that's about it. I've increased performance in a lot of areas and improved the code overall. I'm now taking advantage of Java 7's try-with-resources statement, which is AWESOME and makes JDBC code much less hideous, and I'm no longer doing any catch (Exception e) but rather actually specifying the exceptions e.g. catch (SQLException e). I did also tweak my database tables, which necessitated rewriting my database creation and fake data creation code. I also wrote a test class to make sure the code I wrote is actually functioning pro...