Shambling Towards Perfection

I met with my professor on Monday and luckily he was very understanding about the lack of visible progress this sprint. I wasn't able to demo the entire system, only a few command-line tools to prove that what I did get done is actually working. But he was fine with my progress anyhow. We discussed when we would next meet, and decided that (since I'm crazy busy this week and will be out of town for a few days, as well) we'll meet the Monday after Thanksgiving. So this will be a 3 week sprint. I intend to push hard to finish this rewrite; since I will have a 5 day weekend for Thanksgiving I think it's do-able. This is the beginning of the end for the basic functionality of the system. I should be done by the beginning of the spring semester, leaving revising the UI and the paper as the main things to accomplish next semester. The paper shouldn't be much of a problem; I'm a pretty fast writer and way back in high school I was actually better at English than mo...

Sprint 4 is over. It was somewhat of a disaster. I completely and utterly underestimated the amount of time it would take me to rewrite the data access layer, application layer, and presentation layer. In retrospect it was insane to think it'd go that fast; this is a rewrite of almost the entire project, which I originally created over the course of 3 months. Whoops. Anyway I got through parts of the data access layer rewrite, and that's about it. I've increased performance in a lot of areas and improved the code overall. I'm now taking advantage of Java 7's try-with-resources statement, which is AWESOME and makes JDBC code much less hideous, and I'm no longer doing any catch (Exception e) but rather actually specifying the exceptions e.g. catch (SQLException e). I did also tweak my database tables, which necessitated rewriting my database creation and fake data creation code. I also wrote a test class to make sure the code I wrote is actually functioning pro...

The goal for sprint 4 is to improve the database access code and the JSPs, as well as move Objects from the Session to the Request. The sprint backlog items are: Priority Description Points 200 Move properties out of the session so that users can do things like have multiple browser windows open and bookmark pages 6 190 Improve database access code so that pages load faster 6 180 Refactor JSPs to use JSTL 8 170 Make all JavaScript and HTML fully standards compliant 8 I essentially split what I had been thinking of for the old "Move properties out of the session so that users can do things like have multiple browser windows open and bookmark pages" item into 2, with the other half being "Improve database access code so that pages load faster". This makes things more clear as to what exactly I intend to do. This is 28 ideal man hours; the next two weeks look less busy for me so I think I've got a good chance at making it this time. And so it goes.