Sprint #5: Infrastructure Work Continues was completed today, but progress was marred by influenza at Paul’s house. After a lengthy recovery, he’s feeling much better and back on track. Completed stories were:

• Create Utah Beach module XML meta-data file
• Create OOB for Ten Days in August
• Create OOB for ASoC: Western Front
• Clean up obsolete User Settings code

Even though the OOB stories are marked as completed, they are not finished. They are the beginnings of quite a bit of OOB data for both games.

1914 Orders of Battle

My OOB spreadsheet is more like an encyclopedic WWI spreadsheet, which contains OOB, TO&E, Ordnance and Fortress information. It currently consists of 20 worksheets of combatant data and one bibliographical worksheet of sources. The data cells are composed of a format which will be read by a Ruby script, which will convert this data into a series of game-specific data, suitable for counter generation. Anyway, that is the plan.

The current state of the spreadsheet is good enough for a broad overview of German, Austro-Hungarian, French, Belgian and British forces and capabilities for 1914. Eventually, the Russians and Serbian forces of 1914 will be added, as well as additions for 1915 and beyond.

User Interface Controls

While not finished, I made quite a bit of progress in creating a set of UI objects that should help us speed up our development. The biggest item were containers, objects which contain other objects. And before you say anything, yeah Apple’s XCode tool supplies all sorts of these items. But, I’m not using XCode and Apple does not seem to have any good documentation on pre-built classes of this sort. I will rant about Apple’s development environment and documentation in a later post. The good news right now is that I’m making great progress in building UI elements that I can use programmatically.

Next!

Sprint 6 is going to be more of the same. While Paul will be focused on the top-down view of the application, I will be focused on providing a solid foundation layer of classes to make coding the application easier. This is where I’m most comfortable: digging in the virtual dirt, pouring the foundation and framing the house. I’ll provide the base layer while Paul handles the upper application layers.

Testing is a major part of what we do, including testing each other’s work and doing code reviews. As it’s only the two of us for the foreseeable future, one can see how stopping to test could eat at what is essentially a free-time project. That’s where my wife, Claire, enters the picture. She has offered to help us out with some of the testing. While not a wargamer by any stretch, she can help us out testing the nuts-and-bolts operations of the application, such as making sure that the application installs correctly, that the settings file was created, that user authentication works, etc. While seemingly small, these countless details add up.