Shambling Towards Perfection

I consider the "final exam" containing my presentation and demo of the project plus an oral exam on coursework to be the final sprint review. The committee judging the final exam consisted of my advisor plus another professor from my department (my database professor) and a professor from another department (Accounting and Information Systems; I've been perusing classes in other departments trying to decide what to take next and discovered that she teaches a lot of database-related stuff in BCIS). The review/exam went well in that I did, in fact, pass. The project presentation and demo could hardly have gone better. I was able to answer questions intelligently and explained all the features, pros, cons, etc. of the project with no problem. Two of my friends who also work in the industry attended (the presentation/demo portion is open to the public) and so I answered questions from 5 people who knew lots about the domain in which I worked. I consider that quite an accom...

The meeting yesterday with my professor went fine. It was quite brief, as there wasn’t much to discuss. I let him know that I had committed code to the SVN repository on Sunday, and that I had fixed all the bugs I know of and then started on UI improvements. I had a few questions on stuff I worked on during the sprint, which had all been from comments he’d made earlier, so I got clarifications on those items. He will pull my code on Wednesday and get it deployed on his server, so that’s pretty much the deadline for being done with stuff I want to actually be in the demo on Friday. On Saturday I sent my advisor an outline of the slideshow presentation I’ll have to give, and he did say that was fine. The other thing we got done during the meeting yesterday was making sure my laptop will work in the room where I’ll be presenting. One of my friends advised me to do that, and then I remembered that I’d had massive issues in that very room with my old netbook. I believe it was completely...

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!

So, since my professor is still out on Christmas break (and so am I, for that matter) I asked my husband to be my accountabilibuddy. Yesterday I did a demo for him and showed him all the stuff I on which I worked during the sprint. He was suitably impressed. That's really about all I can say about the review, since I was unable to get any feedback from my adviser. I have also started pondering what I absolutely need to get done before the system is live, and I decided that really the primary thing is to get all the database schema changes done. So those will be my first priority in the next sprint. Some research was required to figure out exactly what changes are required for task dependency and subtask relationships, so I did that yesterday. I bought the book SQL Antipatterns some time ago, and it had a section on representing a tree structure in a database. The subtask relationships do form trees, as each task can only be a subtask of one task, but the task dependency relati...

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...

Yesterday I met with my professor for a demo of the pieces I had working; he was satisfied with it. Then we discussed my plans for the next sprint and through to the beginning of next semester. During the next sprint, I intend to get the entire application running again at the very least. I'm also hoping to start on the list of new features (discussed below) that I'd like to explore; my adviser was open to me doing any/all of them, although as he put it they're really for my own personal development/education rather than requirements from him. Of course the entire project is pretty much an exercise in personal development, since I already know how to make working software, but anyway. My goal with the project is to make an application that's as professional as possible, so I want to include some of the bells and whistles you'd normally expect from a commercial application. This includes things like resetting a forgotten password, locking an account after too many...

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...

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...

Yesterday I met with my advisor to demo what I accomplished in sprint 2. Of course most of it was behind-the-scenes so there wasn't a lot to show, but he seemed pleased with my progress thus far. We discussed the security issues I've been researching and the insanity of trying to secure a web app in general, and he said security would be a good topic to discuss in the project summary paper thing I'll have to write. So I'm already getting a general idea of what will have to go in the paper, which is good. We also discussed what I hope to accomplish in sprint 3 and some plans for sprint 4. Right now there's a ton of steps involved in setting up the project for the first time (configuration files to edit and put various places, editing of tomcat's xml files, creating the database, etc. etc.) and so he'd like to simplify all that so that he can deploy my project on his own machine more easily. So we agreed that that will go in as an item for sprint 4. I'll c...

Yesterday I had my meeting with my prof. Alas, I had some configuration problems on the department machines (Tomcat wouldn't pick up my JRE_HOME setting for unknown reasons) so I wasn't able to demo during the meeting, but I was able to get a demo up and running during my lunch break. The demo included SSL for login, hashed passwords in the database, restricting access to the HSQLDB to the same server it's running on (as far as I can tell; I haven't figured out how to test that one yet), and logging. My prof seemed satisfied with how much I've done so far and we discussed my plans for the next sprint (mostly finishing what I didn't finish this sprint), so the Sprint Review, such as it was, went well. During the meeting I also discovered I won't have to do a written exam on the classes I've taken, contrary to the impression I had gotten from the department webpage, so a big hooray for that. A "project report" describing the project, how I did ...