Shambling Towards Perfection

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...

The goal for sprint 6 is to finish rewriting the application, and to fix and prevent bugs and handle errors gracefully. There are quite a few items left from last time, so those are: Page Points Task 4 New User 1 New Task 1 New File Link 1 New Comment 1 Blocking Tasks 3 Most Recent Tasks 3 Unfinished Tasks 3 This adds up to 17 ideal man hours, which is a little low (hopefully; I like to try and stay optimistic!), so I want to add in a few more items to the sprint backlog. They are: Priority Description Points 510 Fix a bug with navigating to the projects page 0 (5 mins) 500 Fix the login error that occurs when the username doesn't exist in the user table 2 470 Wrap create statements and the fetching of the ID in one database transaction to prevent incorrect results 2 450 Update the application to handle errors nicely 5 This is another 9 hours, which brings us up to 28. I'm ever the optimist, so hopefully this will be the sprint where this is actually succes...