- Planning the MVP 4:54
- Review Creating the MVP 3 questions
- Getting Started 4:36
- Review Separation of Concerns 2 questions
- Storing Guesses 9:45
- Scrabble Tiles 2 objectives
- Prompting for Guesses 9:19
- Conference Registration Assistant 1 objective
- Current Progress 8:22
- Counting Scrabble Tiles 2 objectives
- Remaining Tries 7:04
- Remaining Characters 2 objectives
Preview
Video Player
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Planning the MVP
4:54In this video we will set up the Minimal Viable Product, or MVP for the project we will build during this course. I will introduce several key Agile concepts that we will refer to during the remainder of the course.
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We are now armed with enough information
to build out the project for this course,
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and I feel extremely confident that we can
knock out a game of hangman pretty quick.
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Now, I'd like to use this fun project
to introduce you to a couple of
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agile software development practices.
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The agile methodology is a set
of practices to use when
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programming that help you maintain
focused on your project and
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stay organized, both personally and
within your team.
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While not specifically related
to Java these practices
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are quite common amongst most
software development teams.
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Owing to more info in the teachers notes
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if you're interested in
delving deeper into agile.
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All right, so let's review how
the classic hangman game works.
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So the game is usually played
by two people first one person
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will call them the Prompter comes up
with the word that the other person
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will call the Guesser is going to try and
guess a letter at a time.
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The guesser is showing blank spaces for
each letter.
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The proper keeps track of how many times
the player has had an incorrect guess.
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There is a fixed number of
incorrect guesses that can be made.
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If the guesser guesses
all the letters they win.
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If they don't well, they lose.
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One strategy that is used by some agile
software development teams is to define
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a minimum viable product or MVP.
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What this helps us to do is to define
the minimum requirements to prove
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that our product is working
as we hypothesized it would.
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This helps us keep our scope to only
the required tasks and nothing more.
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Now for example in our project we might
be tempted to add a scoring system or
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ask the guessers name.
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But that doesn't really help us get
the software out the door any quicker.
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This is sort of along
the same lines as YAGNI, or
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ya ain't gonna need it,
that I mentioned earlier.
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The idea here is to get your
product out as soon as possible and
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then change it based on how users
are actually using your software, or
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even better,
what is actually being requested by them.
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A common way of handling scope is to build
a prioritized backlog of user stories.
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Now, I setup a board that we
can use to track our progress.
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Let's go check it out.
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So, this is Trello.
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It's a free web application and
it's primarily used for
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keeping track of things.
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Now, I've used it for several gigs and
I think it's awesome for
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doing software development
through user stories.
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User stories are another agile practice,
but
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basically there are development requests
that are written in a certain form.
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Now writing a good user story is a skill
and definitely its own art form and
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its way out of the scope of this course.
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So please check the teacher's notes for
more.
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Now the main idea though is to communicate
on a high level that everyone,
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both the people requesting the product.
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And the people developing
it can understand.
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It shows what will be delivered and
for what reason
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it does not expose the how that's our
job as developers to figure that out.
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So I've written a few stories that
will run through here together
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as a guess I should be able to submit
a guess so that I can play the game.
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So I'm going to do this
I'm going to click it and
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I'm a drag it over to the to do column.
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Now as you'll notice this is
a common format for users stories.
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As a persona,
I should whatever the feature request is.
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So that and then the reason of why.
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So that really helps convey the message
of what it is we're doing and why.
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So the next story up,
as a guesser I should be presented with my
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current progress so
that I can make an educated guess.
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That makes sense, hangman's hard
without knowing the current progress.
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As a guesser, I should know
how many tries I have left, so
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that I'm encouraged to be cautious.
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Okay, next step, we have as a guesser,
I should be stopped from making
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a guess that has all ready been made so
that I do not waste turns.
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As a guesser I should be able to
know that the game is won or lost so
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that I can acknowledge completion
with celebration or tears.
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Okay, and
I'm gonna stop right here, awesome.
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So we've got the stories that we're
planning to do all set up for us.
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The amount of stories you choose is
sometimes based on an estimate of
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effort that you agree upon as a team.
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Now I estimate that together we can finish
these stories by the end of the course.
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In most agile practices, the word sprint
is used to find a set period of time
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during which specific work will be
completed and made ready to review.
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So in that case this to do column here
is going to represent our sprint and
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this backlog is going to be
stuff that we're going to not,
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say we're not going to do this right.
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This is where we we're talking
about doing things like
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know the name of the guesser or know
the high score we're not gonna do that.
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We're gonna keep that out of the MVP
because we think that we can prove our
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hypothesis of fun hanging.
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I think if we complete all those
stories that should give us our MVP or
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again minimum viable product.
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That is to say as long as we
can deliver on these stories
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we should have a working product that
we can get out the door and iterate on.
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Let's get building.
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