Shambling Towards Perfection

Yesterday I finished my paper and got it sent in, so I’m calling yesterday the end of the sprint. It mostly went well, although some things (like adding all 64 references, and having my paper tech-edited) took much longer than I thought they would. I also pretty much gave up on putting in a user interface section, as even though I finished the book I don’t have time to actually do much to improve the UI. There are a few things suggested by my prof that I’ll do, and that’s about it. So I’m just leaving that section as a thing to do under future work. Anyway, the backlog items that got completed were Add citations for all research done and tools used (4 hours), Reformat with proper section headings (4 hours, though this one was done by my husband/tech-editor), Add section on rewriting data-access layer if not sufficiently covered and application layer (45 minutes), Add something about UCDetector (15 minutes), Describe work-flow for typical user tasks. (Examples and Screen Shots section) ...

The meeting Monday with my advisor was short and quick. He liked the looks of the formatting (courtesy my husband, the technical writer) and said he didn’t want to take a longer look and to just send it out when I thought it was ready. I hadn’t been able to get screenshots/usage scenarios in before the meeting, so I didn’t send the paper out until last night when I got that put in. For our next and final meeting, we agreed that I’d have at least an outline of the topics for the slideshow presentation I’ll be giving as part of my final exam. The presentation plus demo of the software need to take approximately 30 minutes, uninterrupted. I’ll also work on bugs and UI improvements and start cramming reviewing for the oral exam component. That will be... interesting... as one of the topics that usually gets covered during the oral exam is from the very first class I took, in fall 2008. O_O Wish me luck, ‘cause I’m gonna need it!

Finally, on to sprint planning. I'm going to be meeting with my advisor on both remaining Mondays, so I'm going to plan these last few sprints for a week(ish) each, instead of 2 weeks. This also suits the crunched timetable. I couldn't plan last weekend as I needed to know what my advisor thought my priorities should be, and then I had a couple busy weeknights, so here this finally is. There are some development tasks that need doing before The End, but there are a whole lot of non-development tasks, too, and one of those is the most immediate concern. I need to get my paper for my project done by next week. I've gone through 2 drafts, so it's in pretty good shape. I need to add a few sections (screenshots, review, future work, that kind of thing), plus add citations and sources for all the research I've done and tools I've used. I'd also like to add a figure illustrating the security features I've added, and another showing the database schema, p...