Shuffl sprint 4 progress review

The plan for sprint 4 has been updated with progress and review notes:

• http://code.google.com/p/shuffl/wiki/SprintPlan_4

In outline, the sprint activity was:

• week 1: complete workspace persistence (initial cut)
• week 2: UI for data access; expand testing framework; card refactoring to MVC pattern
• week 3: tabular data loading and display; started on data graphing

The sprint has been characterized by good progress and technical compromises. Many of the completed tasks are not implemented completely as I would like or had originally intended, so I feel I may be accumulating some "technical debt" that will need to be addressed before the project can be truly usable by unsupported researchers and others. The user interface for saving/restoring workspaces is a case in point. See http://code.google.com/ p/shuffl/wiki/ TechnicalDebt for more details.

There has been less community engagement than planned, though some new use-cases have been noted (FlyKit, e-learning).

For the first time, I have calculated a "velocity"figure (planned effort for completed tasks/total sprint effort): 11.0/11.4 = 0.96. This figure was a surprise to me: I was expecting it to be lower on account of the unplanned time spent on admin, etc. Total sprint effort here does not include the small amount of unplanned additional time spent on other projects. Prediction of progress remains challenging with so many competing demands on limited time.