Sonjaya Tandon

Agenda Redux Iteration 2 wrap-up

June 4th, 2006

ITERATION 2: Item entry and category column assignment

The goal of iteration 2 is to get a minimalistic version of the product in your hands. Functionally, we want you to be able to do the following:

1. Add/Remove Sections DONE
2. Add/Remove Columns DONE
3. Add/Remove Items DONE
4. Assign items to categories Moved to later iteration

At the end of this iteration, the product will only support one view, but you will be able to configure that view using the above mentioned functions. Also, the screens should look much nicer than they do in their current incarnation. We will also be ramping up a new team member in this iteration and giving our deployment procedures their first try. Somewhere along in there, we will also try to enjoy Memorial day weekends and the graduations that accompany it

From the project plan, the iteration objectives are:

1. Define requirements and design for a simple view DONE
2. Implement view with columns PARTIAL
3. Deployment procedures defined and in use PARTIAL
4. Setup group project infrastructure DONE
5. Team member ramp up DONE

The memorial day weekend ended up being a bigger hit than anticipated. However we hit the major accomplishments we needed. The most important thing that happened is that the team went from 1 person (me) to the full team size (5). This iteration established a good foundation for team synergy. We introduced the project wiki (this is our primary project communication tool — requirements, project operations, daily focus all go here) and it has molded it self very nicely. All of the other project collaboration tools are online and in use.

The two main things we had to move to later iterations were:

1. Assign items to categories: While the underlying server side code is in place and tested for this feature, the user interface for this ended up being much more work than would have fit into the iteration. So, we moved this feature to iteration 3.
2. Formal deployment process: Our host is one version behind on Rails, so we won’t be able to formalize the deployment process until they upgrade. The site has successfuly been deployed to agendaredux.com — you can look at it, just don’t expect to get very far until our host upgrades

As you will see in the walk through, the interface is still very basic and VERY FAR from what it will be when we are at the end of release one. But what it shows is that the core Agenda objects and operations are functional.
So, once you login, you see the workbench window:

Click on “New File:”

Enter in a name and press “Add File”. We pre-generate a few categories, a view, a section, and a column.

Before we can test out Add Section or Add Column, we will need to add some more categories. Click on “Category Manager”. You can see the pre-generated categories.

Add a “Places” category (and add New York as a child of Places). Add a “Concepts” category. Yeah! Adding categories still work

Now that we have some new categories, click on Main View. And type Places in the column field to start to add a column.

Click on “Add Column” to add the column. You will see Places to the right of People.

Now start to add a “Concepts” section.

Click on “Add Section” to add the section. You will now see a concepts section below Ideas.

Start adding a task.

And click on “Add Item” to add the task. Yeah! Adding tasks still works. I don’t have screenshots for it, but deleting all these things work as well.

Entry Filed under: Agenda Redux