We were unable to finish implementing all the features we had planned for Sprint 1 due to overestimating the complexity of the codebase and overstating the difficulty of adding code to the code base to make our changes. Finding where we needed to make changes was harder than we thought and took up a majority of our time. As a result, we were only able to make contributions towards two of the user stories we had planned despite planning to accomplish more this sprint. Thus, for sprint two, we plan on focusing on finishing these user stories. We made progress towards both back-end and front-end features of user story 1 and 2 (anonymous posting and answered questions), but were unable to fully finish features due to bugs, failed tests, and an underestimation of feature size. The original features we had laid out during Sprint 1 planning were too large and needed to be broken down into smaller features.
In addition, some of us were assigned to implement UI changes, but could not figure out how to implement such UI changes until the professors posted a guide later on which resulted in less being accomplished due to the short turnaround time and scheduling conflicts with other extra curricular activities and school work.

US1 Backend
The back-end of anonymous posting ended up consisting of a lot of changes that needed to be done. While I was able to accomplish changing the UI of an anonymous post by modifying the back-end, I did not have time to develop and hook up code that would mark a post as anonymous. I explored how to change the user’s profile picture if the post was anonymous but could not figure out how since the code that loaded in the image was associated with the UID of the post’s author and conducted by a module that did not have access to the anonymous attribute of a post. Furthermore, a large aspect of anonymous posting that we underestimated were permissions. It was hard to determine how to set up permissions so that admins would see the author and non-admins would see an anonymous user for an anonymous post. We needed more time to explore this but did not have much time since changing the UI of an anonymous post took up more time than expected. Furthermore, I underestimated the testing time for features as most of the testing was done by validating the front-end UI had changed. However, there were tests in the test suite that were failing that I was unable to figure out.

US2 Backend
When working on the backend for developing the unanswered/answered label for different topics, it took some time to be able to identify where exactly in the codebase to make the relevant changes; for instance, whether it should be in the src/topics directory or src/posts directory. Additionally, to check to see if a teaching staff had answered the question based on their UID saved in the database; instead, it was defaulted to check if an admin had answered the question due to limitations in the understanding of the database schema. Also, I have had difficulty in modifying the database schema to have an ‘answered’ attribute for each topic for the UI integration to be easier; this task will be carried over to sprint 2 to be completed by the end of the milestone.

US1 UI
Some difficulties I encountered were being short on time and conflicts with other classes. I had a game on Saturday Night of this week that effectively cut my time in half to make the UI changes I wanted to make and to test them on top of an already extra ordinary course load. It also was no help that I was unable to get our custom theme to run in a Dev Container, as I kept running into errors following the instructions provided in both the theme and dev container docs to get things to run and could not access dev mode to view any of the changes I made in the code. It was challenging to sort through the code and find what does what, but I think I managed fairly well and made the correct changes to the correct code files in our custom theme. Working in parallel on theme changes was also interesting, but I think we had the right approach, as I switched to his branch and made a separate branch off of that to have access to the theme and continue to develop it for my purposes.

US2 UI
When working on the UI for developing the unanswered/answered label for different topics, I was able to hardcode a section into the UI of a post to show that it was answered, though this was applied to every post since I didn’t have time to connect this to the backend. Though I was able to view these changes once, there have been problems surrounding my server, even after using the development container, which I have to work on to fix. Connecting this to backend logic will be my goal for sprint 2