Week 12 - Taxiing For Takeoff
This week has seen me return from the UK, and us finally return to some pairing after a disjointed couple of weeks where we've only managed it periodically. Sadly I wasn't able to acquire an iPad whilst I was in the UK, they seem to be rather popular.
I started the week in Tunbridge Wells, where I got stuck into a couple of minor improvements to our features, penalty points and a few tidy up activities such as making our 404 pages look ok. Arun also knocked off a couple of minor alterations to functionality.
When I returned I redesigned the Gameplan Homepage, I'm not entirely happy with it as yet, but it better describes our services and we've put it live on our 'real life' host, Heroku. In parallel Arun spent some time this week focussing on his transformation into an Adwords specialist, targeting a wider range of keywords to drive some more traffic to the new homepage.
It's been successful and we've increased the amount of click-throughs and email signups happening per day, although we're getting a low conversion rate. We've started speaking to the guys at myADengine to give us a hand, and we'll be using their excellent multi-ad-network product from now on.
We've also lined up some more meetings with some interested local sports organisations, the shoe leather approach to initial marketing continues alongside the more digital model.
Last week Arun discussed our plans for a relatively complex state machine implementation for the planning stage of a season. We spent an hour beginning the implementation before asking ourselves the key question... what is the benefit? After some more paper-scribbling we decided to put it on hold until we really feel the pain, for now we can manage with what we have. Once again proving that pair programming stops you burrowing down holes.
The final significant milestone was one we'd pencilled in for early next week, sending email when teams and managers are invited to take part in a competition. The great revelation was the discovery of email_spec a gem that lets you test in the delivery of email in Cucumber.
Some example code:
Then "bob@email.com" should receive an email
When they open the email
Then they should see "confirm" in the email
When they follow "confirm" in the email
Then they should see "Confirm your new account"
Awesome no? Testing email in plain English including being able to click links. Very slick.
Elsewhere, our video interview from Echelon went live on e27 this week. Feel free to wander over and see what we look like!
Stats
6 issues closed on GitHub, 11 new features added leading to a current total of 75. 3917 lines of code and 7934 lines of test code with a code-to-test ratio of 1:2.0. We're only counting the code in our main project so we've written a bit more than this!
