Shambling Towards Perfection

I keep feeling like I haven't really done that much, and that I'll need to seriously pick up the pace this semester to finish on time. But then this weekend I was contemplating my backlog and list of completed items... The posterboard on the far left is the product backlog, and the one on the far right is the sprint activity chart. The middle two posterboards? Those are all completed items. So really, I've been busy! Things are definitely proceeding. Graduation here I come!

As I was about to work on one of the items for the sprint I realized it'd be a LOT easier if I cleaned up my code first. I've been meaning to do this and it really should have gone in as a sprint backlog item, so I added an unplanned item to the sprint. Basically I ended up with a ton of unused database-related methods, since I rewrote large portions of the data access layer. I didn't remove things as I went along just in case something somewhere needed them; I didn't want to break anything as I went along. But at this point I need to get rid of those methods and clean things up! Being an Eclipse user, I wondered if there were a plug-in to help with this task. So I discovered UCDetector . This thing is great for cleaning up small projects like mine. I just had to tell it to detect, and presto! I had a list of methods that weren't being used. It also had some recommendations on classes/methods/etc. that could be made less public. Very cool. Anyway I thought this

The goal for sprint 8 is to make any necessary database schema changes and to add as many features (not just making the UI prettier) as possible. The sprint backlog items are: Priority Description Points 600 Add columns/tables to database to support task dependency/subtask relationships. 2 590 Add columns to user table to support lockout after failed login attempts. 2 580 Add checks for authorized access to all CRUD operations. 3 570 Wrap create statements and the fetching of the ID in one database transaction to prevent incorrect results (if necessary). 2 560 Update the application to handle errors nicely. 5 550 Check all error-related redirects to make sure they work properly. 1 540 Add try/catch blocks for parseInt calls and handle errors appropriately. 1 530 Fix weird errors when project only has one user (instructor is the only student). 2 520 Change code to use connection pooling. 3 This is a total of 21 hours, which I think I can do by the middle of next week. If

So, since my professor is still out on Christmas break (and so am I, for that matter) I asked my husband to be my accountabilibuddy. Yesterday I did a demo for him and showed him all the stuff I on which I worked during the sprint. He was suitably impressed. That's really about all I can say about the review, since I was unable to get any feedback from my adviser. I have also started pondering what I absolutely need to get done before the system is live, and I decided that really the primary thing is to get all the database schema changes done. So those will be my first priority in the next sprint. Some research was required to figure out exactly what changes are required for task dependency and subtask relationships, so I did that yesterday. I bought the book SQL Antipatterns some time ago, and it had a section on representing a tree structure in a database. The subtask relationships do form trees, as each task can only be a subtask of one task, but the task dependency relati

So sprint 7 was finally finished last night. I ended up hardly being able to work on the project at all during what was supposed to be the sprint (December 10-24), so this was mostly done during the last week. Being off of work has, unsurprisingly, really helped increase the amount I can get done. So I'll do another sprint for the next week or so, and then in the middle or end of next week I'll work with my professor to get the project set up on his machine and usable for the spring semester. This means I'll need to get all database schema changes done ASAP. That'll be my first focus for the next sprint. During the sprint I finished all of the sprint backlog items. Those are: Set up git repository (1 hour), Rewrite edit user/task/project code (3 hours), Change email code as per discussion (2), Rewrite unfinished tasks page (3), Rewrite most recent tasks page (3), Rewrite blocking tasks page (3), Fix login error when user doesn't exist (1). I pretty quickly gave