Shambling Towards Perfection

Today I met with my advisor and we discussed the last sprint, including the issues I had. He decided I should try using the CS email system without authentication, and if that didn't work, the university's email system. I was able to do this during lunch and while the CS system still wouldn't work, I was able to send through the university's system, so that's what we'll be using. This makes the item Fix the email notification system so that it works with the CS department email settings finished, with around 2 hours of work. We also decided to backburner the attempts to get SSL redirection working from the root of the webapp, seeing as I can't figure out the problem and nobody on StackOverflow has even been able to help. As a last resort I can do the redirect programatically, but I would much prefer to do it via Tomcat's configuration if possible. My professor did seem generally pleased with my progress, and when I described the issues I had with PMD...

Sprint 3 is now complete. It went fairly well, although again I had trouble finding time to work on the project. There were some other frustrations which I'll detail below. I finished 3 backlog items: Run automated tools e.g. FindBugs to ensure code is correct and clean (8 hours), Write a shell script or similar to start the database server and tomcat (1 hour), and Fix the build.xml to only copy the correct jars to the web app's lib directory (15 minutes). Then there was the stuff I worked on a lot and didn't get done... I started on both Restrict the login page to only allow access via SSL and Fix the email notification system so that it works with the CS department email settings. For the former, I got SSL redirection working if the user navigates directly to the login page (e.g. http://localhost:8080/ProjectManagementSystem/login.html) but despite my best efforts I couldn't figure out how to get it to redirect if the user goes to the root of the web app (http://loc...

One of the issues for this sprint was improving my code's correctness. I installed and used the Eclipse plugins FindBugs , PMD , and CheckStyle . While these did point out some very valid issues, including not properly closing database resources, doing really bad things in an override of equals, etc., they also pointed out some things that completely flummoxed me. The biggest example is that apparently in Java one can declare virtually anything as final, including method parameters. I had known that methods and classes could be declared final though I had never used such functionality (nor had it explained or recommended either during my Bachelors degree or during my Masters degree, despite MANY Java-centric classes), but parameters was a new one. Some claim parameters should be declared final, while others say it clutters code for very little benefit. Additionally if you do, in fact, reassign a value to a parameter, the very same tools will mark it as an error. So there's qu...

The goal for sprint 3 will be to make the project usable for my adviser and start making it more user friendly and start making the code more correct. There are several small tweaks I need to do so that everything will work correctly for my prof, so I need to do that, plus the FindBugs item from the last sprint. Code correctness and user-friendliness are very long-term goals, but this will be their beginning. The sprint backlog items are: Priority Description Points 300 Run automated tools e.g. FindBugs to ensure code is correct and clean 6 253 Write a shell script or similar to start the database server and tomcat 3 252 Fix the build.xml to only copy the correct jars to the web app's lib directory 2 251 Restrict the login page to only allow access via SSL 2 250 Fix the email notification system so that it works with the CS department email settings 4 200 Move properties out of the session so that users can do things like have multiple browser windows open and bookmark...