Shambling Towards Perfection

So I figured I should do some final(ish?) updates on the project and finish off the sprint data and so forth. So here's the sprint 11 retrospective. It went swimmingly and I finished everything by the time it needed to be finished. Many things took even less time than I thought they would, so I didn't actually end up having to stay up all of Tuesday night to finish the programming issues before Wednesday morning. The tasks I finished were: Mark subtasks on the project page.  (15 minutes) "Task created" page should return to the project page. (15 minutes) Add a link to the login page/project page (depending on whether or not the user is logged in) to the error page. (10 minutes) Turn the subtask radio buttons on the task/new task pages into a drop down list. (.5 hour) Change the dependency checkboxes on the task/new task pages into a drop down and a button to add more drop downs as needed. (1 hour) (Actually changed to 3 checkboxes for now) Make the comment te...

This sprint went remarkably well. Being a hermit all weekend helped me to get as much done as I wanted to (and is probably the only way I could have gotten as much done as I wanted to in earlier sprints, but that really, really doesn’t work as a long-term thing unless one wishes to leave sanity behind). There was one item I started on and then realized I needed clarification from my advisor before I could complete it, but I got everything else done. I also didn’t do quite as much studying as I had intended; honestly I really, really don’t want to have to do this wretched studying, so I procrastinated. Anyway here are the items I did get done: Create outline for presentation. Gather study materials for oral exam. Fix task creation error where error message is sometimes shown though the task was created. Fix blocking tasks page. Fix task editing bug where the task creator can’t edit the title/desc. Study for the oral exam. (sort of, as discussed above) Move the task list on the...

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) ...

So clearly I fell off the sprint-wagon. Things got a bit away from me at the start of the semester, and so I just haven't been doing the formal sprint stuff. I've been working on bugs and configuring Tomcat, plus getting the first draft of my paper written. But I need to get organized again in order to finish what needs finishing before I present my project May 3 (only 3 weeks away, ack!), so I'm going to restart with sprinting and all that for the little time I have left.  So for sprint 8, I did finish all but one task, Fix weird errors when project only has one user (instructor is the only student). For two other tasks, I'm not sure how long it took to finish them because I didn't write it down (the beginning of my slide into not being scrummy): Update the application to handle errors nicely and Change code to use connection pooling. I finished the rest normally: Add columns/tables to database to support task dependency/subtask relationships (1), Add co...

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 ...

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...

So on Sunday I finished sprint 5. It went fairly well, although I didn't have as much time as I like, despite it being a 3 week long sprint. I was out of town for 4 days, plus there was that whole Thanksgiving thing, so it came out to be more like 2 weeks after all. Considering the amount of time I had, I think it went ok. There were a few oddities and bumps in the road. First, I was highly annoyed when I discovered that in JDBC the table name/alias isn't included in ResultSet column names . Instead, you have to alias the actual column if you need to distinguish between column names in the result. Grr. Second, I discovered that it's really kind of a pain to call static methods using JSTL .  Since I use static methods in virtually every JSP to format the output for HTML/links/etc. to ensure user input doesn't do whacky things, this is a problem. For now I'm putting off rewriting the JSPs to use JSTL, because I'll have to write custom EL functions and maybe tw...

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...

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...

So I finished sprint 2 today. Yet again my biggest problem is finding enough time to put in as much work as I'd like. I suspect this will be an ongoing problem. I am mostly pleased with how much I accomplished though. I finished 3 backlog items: Fix fake data insertion code (1 hour), Add additional sanitization of input and other security measures (6 hours), and Add logging statements throughout the code (3). The only somewhat troubling aspect is that I'm still not 100% sure I've considered all the possible security issues. I've done a LOT of googling, but this information is extremely scattered. There's no comprehensive "Java web app security guide" that I've been able to find (though the OWASP stuff is very good and somewhat close). Mostly I've gone searching for one thing, and a random link or post will lead me to other things. It seems like you have to know what all the issues are in advance and then start searching for solutions to those iss...

So last night I started thinking about sprint 1 and how it went, what I'd do differently etc. for the sprint retrospective. The biggest thing I learned is that there's no way I can put in as much time each week as I'd like to on the project. I would love to put in 20 hours per week but that's just not going to be possible while maintaining my sanity. The biggest problem is that weeknights quickly get crowded, so I can really only get in a half-hour here or an hour there M-F. As such I need to concentrate on getting a lot done on the weekends. I'm going to start designating one day per weekend as a project day and do no other activities on that day. This should help a lot, I hope. The main thing I will be sure to do differently is to set up the demo much earlier. I waited until Sunday night and then ran out of time. Next time I'll set it up in the morning/early afternoon of my designated project day in case something goes wrong. I'll officially end my sprin...