Sprint 5 Retrospective

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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 tweak the web.xml file to use the servlet 3.0 standard and all that will take awhile and probably a lot of tweaking.

I also somehow managed to forget when I did my sprint planning that I needed to change the database schema to include last login date/time for users as well as last edited by and last edited at fields for both tasks and projects. This is needed to do nifty stuff like show the user what updates have been made since they last logged in. So that was an unplanned item that I needed to take care of, and it required rewriting the database creation code, fake data creator, and some of the data access code. The fields aren't yet actually being updated properly nor are they being used for anything, so that will have to go into a future sprint.

So anyhow, the items I got done were:
  1. Change the database schema to include last login date for users and last edited at/by for projects/tasks: 4 hours
  2. Rewrite users page: 3 hours
  3. Rewrite user page: 1 hour
  4. Rewrite projects page: 1 hour
  5. Rewrite project page: 3 hours
  6. Rewrite new project page: 1 hour
  7. Rewrite instructors page: 1 hour
  8. Rewrite config page: 0 hours (I'd done the database part and found everything else still worked, yay!)
And there's also the time I spent investigating the whole JSTL/custom functions issue, starting to implement it, and figuring out it was going to take way too long, which was another 3 hours.

Unfortunately I completely forgot to record my progress as I went along, so I don't have a burndown chart for this sprint. I'll try and do better for sprint 6, although really, upon further reflection I'm not sure how useful these charts actually are for this type of project. At work they're extremely useful because we have a fairly consistent amount of time for each sprint. Even if we have unusual meetings or events they don't take up that large a percent of our time (2.5 developers x 40 hours a week x 2 weeks per sprint). When it's just one developer working in her spare time, it's a whole lot more unpredictable as to how much development time is even available in a sprint... Perhaps there's some better way to show the chart, possibly excluding days on which no work takes place? I don't know, but I shall ponder.

At any rate things went fairly well this sprint other than the nearly-ubiquitous lack of development time I've been facing. Luckily the next two weeks should be less busy, so I think I can get a fair bit done in before my last meeting with my prof for the semester.

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