DEV Community

Matt Layman
Matt Layman

Posted on • Originally published at mattlayman.com

Polishing and Usability - Building SaaS #69

In this episode, we polished some parts of the application. Now that my first customer is using the app regularly, the feedback is coming in rapidly. We worked to fix some of the issues that she found.

The first issue that I tackled dealt with ambiguity about a course's relationship to a school year on the course's detail page. I fixed this issue by displaying the grade level on the course page to provide all the details. This change makes it clear what grade level the course is connected to. This is useful because courses in the school year could have the same name (e.g., "Math").

The next issue that we worked on was related to the ordering of data on the schedule pages. The schedules pages showed information for each student in the school. This was broken for a couple of reasons:

  1. The order of students may not match the order of grade levels. That leads to a mismatch when looking at the school year versus looking at the schedule view. 2. The schedule would show students even if they weren't enrolled in the school year.

I fixed the daily and weekly schedule views by changing the logic from looping over all the students to looping over all the enrollments for a school year. This change corrected both of the problems that were present in the view.

After changing that in two place, I observed the common implementation that was duplicated in two views. Because of the duplication, we did some refactoring to extract that logic into a shared method on the Student model.

At the end of the stream, as I cleaned up the code to prepare to commit it, we cleaned up some test code based on some observations about how the tests behaved with the new code.

Oldest comments (0)