The Software Development Lifecycle

• Bullet One
• Bullet Two
• Bullet Three

Requirements to Design: An Abstraction

• What problem are we trying to solve?
• What does a good outcome look like - start with the end
• Then come up with a solution

Requirements to Design:

A Series of Abstractions

• Product concept: How can we solve the problem with software?
• Product design: Epics, user stories, acceptance criteria, UI design
• Stack design: frontend, backend, data layer, integrations
• Software design (OO): Entities, objects, relationships (UML diagram)

Project Intro

The Big Design Up-Front vs Incremental Design

"Traditional Engineering"

• One step at a time
• Ensure the current step is perfect before moving onto the next one
• A big design up front

Problems with Designing Up-Front

1. Too many unknown unknowns
2. What if the requirements change?

Iterative Design

• Work in sprints, iterations, milestones
• 'Agile' software development
• Many variants - eXtreme programming, Rapid Application Development, Kanban, Scrum
• Design incrementally
  • Adapt to changes in requirements
  • Discover and deal with problems in design as they arise

Problems with Incremental Design

• No clear sense of direction/trajectory
• In poorly designed systems, adaptations to new requirements become smaller-scale 'workarounds' - limit functionality/decrease maintainability
• Tendency to 'make it up as we go along'

A solution?

• Design a broad overview up-front
• A framework to begin development
• Adapt and change the design during development as needed
• Set the trajectory and boundaries of work at the start
• Design up-front a solution that is open for extension, reusable, etc.
• Milestone 1 

Project Management

• Scope - requirements to implement
• Time
• Resources
• Outcome - quality
• We care more about quality than quantity in this project

What even is Software Quality?

• Software that works
• Software that is well tested
  • ​Provides assurance that the software does actually work
• Software that is well designed
  • What happens when the requirements evolve?
  • Milestone 3

Building an MVP

• Focus of Milestone 2
• Get something basic working that is well tested and well designed
• Break the requirements up into small features
• Prioritise the most important features and complete first
• Approach:
  • Make a new branch for a single feature e.g. nick/battle
  • Design and stub out classes / functions
  • Write failing unit tests
  • Implement so the tests pass
  • Merge branch into master

Project Management

• Test-Driven Development
• Git practices
  • One feature, one branch, one merge request into master
  • Approve merge requests & code reviews
  • Code on master should always be stable
• Meeting minutes
• Use of GitLab Taskboard or Jira Taskboard
• Timeline (next slide)

Timeline

• Delegate requirements to each person
• Considerations
  • Sequencing of Tasks - which tasks are most important? Which need completing first for others? (prerequisites)
  • Allocation of Tasks - allocate equally and based on availability
  • Timespan of Tasks - how long will each task take?