Just like that, I am writing the final sprint retrospective for our capstone project working with AMPATH Informatics! I have learned so much about the development process, contributing to open source software, and especially working in a Scrum development team. I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to work with the AMPATH developers, my team, who were extremely helpful and made this experience valuable. I am thankful that the software development capstone has allowed me to contribute to a real-world application, and hopefully make some small difference.
In terms of concrete tasks for this sprint, I took on fewer development stories than in previous sprints, and chose to focus more on documenting and producing tests for what I have already contributed. Other team members were assigned develop tasks, however, and our implementation of an offline login is close to being a shippable product. The main item blocking a pull request to AMPATH is the lack of encryption for the stored credentials. They are currently only encoding in base64, which is about as good as plain text. We are unsure whether a working encryption implementation will be available before time runs out.
One of the development tasks that I took on for this sprint was to update the refresh time of the online tracker indicator on the bottom of the screen. When Dominique added a checkbox element to the user interface, she used a subscription that updated every three seconds. As a result, the checkbox would appear even when the online tracker indicated that the user was still offline. To fix this, I updated the refresh time of the online tracker component to match the subscription of the checkbox.
Another task that was assigned to Dominique and Luigi for this sprint was to implement the backend logic for the checkbox. While there are still some bugs, we should be able to work through them as a team if they are not resolved by the time we meet for review and retrospective. This logic should store credentials in localStorage only when the checkbox is checked.
A task that was assigned to Matt was to document the current status of our offline login implementation. During our in-class meetings, I discussed with Matt how my implementation works and where I made changes to the code in order to allow the user to login offline. I think that we will continue this task into the final presentation preparation sprint, where we all will be documenting our contributions.
Kwame was assigned the task of looking at writing tests for the offline login implementation. While he had some trouble writing tests, I think that this is something that we can all work on in the final sprint as part of documenting what we have done. I think that it might be easier to write tests for the code that we have contributed as individuals, rather than assigning all of the test writing to one person.
As mentioned earlier, we are waiting on an encryption service for the storage of user credentials from another team. While we were able to accomplish most of the requirements for the offline login implementation, the lack of encryption has kept us from submitting much of anything to AMPATH. Storing the user’s credentials in plain text is far too risky from a security standpoint, and I am doubtful that the developers would accept our implementation without encryption.
I am very happy with the progress that we’ve made as a team. I have certainly improved from the beginning of the semester, and it has been great to see other members of the team improve as well. I’m looking forward to the last sprint where we will compile all of what we have learned and implemented into a presentation.
From the blog CS@Worcester – ~/GeorgeMatthew/etc by gmatthew and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.