Shambling Towards Perfection

One of my goals for this year is to read a book per month that's related to my work. I've already finished the book for January, mainly because I had started it last year, but hey, it counts! Anyhow, the book is Don't Make Me Think  by Steve Krug . While it is a little dated with respect to mobile UX at this point (this 3rd edition was published in 2014), it was a very useful read with lots of specific, actionable advice. So much so that I had to give up on trying to bookmark every useful thing and just created a long list of ideas and items to discuss with my fellow devs instead. I highly recommend this book if you, like me, are a dev who is responsible for user interfaces without having (almost) any formal training on UI or UX. In other words, most devs from a traditional CS background... Argh. But anyhow, it really is a great resource for simple, specific ways to improve your user interfaces. We're definitely going to redesign our navigation based on the great...

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...

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.

The goal for sprint 3 will be to make the project usable for my adviser and start making it more user friendly and start making the code more correct. There are several small tweaks I need to do so that everything will work correctly for my prof, so I need to do that, plus the FindBugs item from the last sprint. Code correctness and user-friendliness are very long-term goals, but this will be their beginning. The sprint backlog items are: Priority Description Points 300 Run automated tools e.g. FindBugs to ensure code is correct and clean 6 253 Write a shell script or similar to start the database server and tomcat 3 252 Fix the build.xml to only copy the correct jars to the web app's lib directory 2 251 Restrict the login page to only allow access via SSL 2 250 Fix the email notification system so that it works with the CS department email settings 4 200 Move properties out of the session so that users can do things like have multiple browser windows open and bookmark...