Sprint 7 Retrospective

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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 up trying to keep a burndown chart for this sprint, since it was so screwy. I'm beginning to think that as far as student projects go, that particular artifact of scrum really just isn't useful. When you're working just here and there, whenever you can, it's extremely difficult to use past results to predict future performance. At work, where we're there 8 hours every day, it's great, but with this? Not so much.

During this sprint I did get git set up on my machine and connected to BitBucket. I am REALLY enjoying being able to work with git for this project. I can commit and back up my work even if it's not functional and not worry my adviser will happen to pull right then, and I can easily branch and all the fun stuff git makes possible. Hooray! My only question now is why the heck I didn't do this months ago.

So at any rate things are proceeding rapidly for the time being. I'll be back to work on Monday so things will slow down again, but I'm hoping to keep my pace a higher for the next few months. I really, really want to graduate in May, so I'm determined to do whatever it takes to do that.

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