Week 4 - Looking at the Front
After spending our first three weeks working on the administration features we've spent this week getting a very basic front-end (i.e. no prettiness!) working for Gameplan.
With our 'product' heads on we realise that getting the building blocks right at this stage will really help us in the next 'polish for echelon and launch' stage.
One of the key things that stands out for me in thoughtfully designed applications is the URL structure, so we had a long discussion early in the week about how that should look in a browser. Also as we will be launching a RESTful API in the future (not for launch - priorities!) the endpoints for that are also very important.
A key tool for us this week was the Ruby gem subdomain-fu. Many web applications use the http://accountname.webapp.com pattern to subdivide a hosting service and we will be no exception. It plugs straight into the routing system in Rails and works very elegantly, meaning a lot less headaches than we were planning for. We knocked out the basic HTML pages for most of the site in a couple of days.
Other milestones included the validation on our work last week meaning we're now able to track the main statistics for most team sports: pretty much everything except cricket. I have a feeling that at some later date there's going to be a 'cricket integration' project.
The last couple of days have seen us filling out some of our optional data structures, which we know a lot of sports organisers will want (based on the existing features on some current sports websites).
Ironically in the week in which I eulogised the benefits of pair programming this work was to prepare us for a week apart. I have to go back to the UK for the wedding of some good friends (in what will become a recurring occurrence this year). So next week, I'll be working on an initial design for both the administration interface and a standard theme for the front-end. Arun will be working on a flexible importer for existing organisations.
These are tasks that fall outside of the typical product development cycle although we'll be doing our best to keep things collaborative. We've already discussed our approaches to the tasks at hand and we'll be keeping in touch. UK mornings are broadly Singapore afternoons so we'll be online together then.
We'll be using Campfire (rather than IM) due to it's transcript and image upload features so I can share the design work. If we need to collaborate on something on screen we'll use iChat's screen sharing.
It'll be interesting to see how effective we are.
Weekly Stats
19 issues closed on GitHub, 17 new features added leading to a current total of 44 with 184 scenarios. 1475 lines of code and 5095 lines of test code with a code-to-test ratio of 1:3.5.
