Shambling Towards Perfection

The goal for sprint 7 is to create a git repo and finish the rewrite of the application, for reals this time. Including some of the items left over from last sprint, the sprint backlog items are: Priority Description Points 600 Set up git repository 2 590 Rewrite edit user/task/project code 4 580 Change email code as per discussion 3 570 Rewrite unfinished tasks page 3 560 Rewrite most recent tasks page 3 550 Rewrite blocking tasks page 3 500 Fix login error when user doesn't exist 2 This is a total of 20 hours, which, considering the time of year, seems more reasonable than 30ish. I'll also be doing some research on how to improve the task dependency/subtask relationships. Ideally I want to be able to display trees of these relationships (akin to comment trees on some websites), and this may require some database schema changes, all of which I want to get done in sprint 8 (before going live, basically). And that's it.

Yet again my biggest problem during this sprint was finding time to work on it. Considering the time of year, this isn't really a surprise. All the same, I had hoped to have more time than I did. During sprint 7 I'm going to try as hard as I can to work on the project at least a little every day. I've got a lot of stuff to do before next semester, so I want to get to doing it! I also thought of a number of things I had overlooked and discovered a few odd bugs, so the product backlog grew a bit during this sprint. I finished rewriting the new file link page (3 hours), the new user page (1 hour), the new task page (2 hours), new comment page (1 hour), the task page (3 hours), and I fixed the bug with navigating to the projects page (15 minutes). Some things took a good deal longer than estimated... There were no big issues during my development time, however I realized I had completely neglected to include time for making editing of tasks and projects work. Basically I wa...

Today I met with my adviser for the sprint 6 review and demo. It was pretty uneventful. I didn't get nearly as much done as I had hoped due to the busy holiday season (even programmers have friends and family, shockingly!), but what I did get done went well and turned out fine. All but the complicated  (recent activity/unfinished tasks/blocking tasks) read-only pages are done, and all of the creation code now works, so I demoed that. Then we discussed the project's email update capabilities, as I realized during the sprint that we'd never really talked about how that should work. If a user sets their preference to receive update emails, they get emailed when updates occur to their projects and tasks. I had originally set it up so that only the task creator and assignee would receive emails, but my adviser decided he would want emails as an instructor for every task update, even in the case of a student-led project where one student might create the task and assign it to a...

I've discovered I really hate testing. This is probably not a unique trait among developers. However it's really starting to be an impediment; I just don't feel like doing the testing which makes me not want to work on the project when that's the next thing I need to do. So I think I need to start procrastinating on testing, at least a little. I'm thinking I'll finish a couple of features, then test them all at once. Maybe have an official test day every other day or every third day or something. Of course this may backfire and end up with me frantically doing testing and the inevitable bug fixing all weekend long, but hey, at least the main development work will have been done. We shall see... (And yeah, obviously that whole test-driven development thing hasn't yet been implemented. I just don't know what I'm doing sufficiently to implement it, yet. Some day!)