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September 2013 – First Contact

September 23, 2013 Agile / Aliens
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First Contact

First Contact

Date: Thursday 26th September 2013

Time: 7:00pm

Venue: Staffordshire University – Stafford Campus (K106 – the Octagon building)

 

Last month we continued our discussions and began creating the RESTful implementation of our alien invasion game with the creation of the game controller.

Continuing with getting the minimal feature set completed, this month we look to address the missing features to move us towards our first RESTful client integration.  The server needs to respond to requests for a wave and generate responses to a defence strategy. Once the simple implementation of London is working, we can then look towards multiple stages, persistent weapons states and teams.

Hope to see you there,
Jonathan

August 2013 – Some RESTful coding

August 27, 2013 Agile / Aliens
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Date: Thursday 29th August 2013

Time: 7:00pm

Venue: Staffordshire University – Stafford Campus (K106 – the Octagon building)

Following my brief refresher on REST and HTTP verbs, the group started to collaborate on a API designs that would allow Alien Invasion to present a language agnostic interface. Whilst much of this API would be fairly straightforward, the group thought that a couple of coding spikes would be useful to cement ideas, and ensure the approach both works and is easy to understand.

With these validation spikes in mind, August’s meeting on Thursday aims to focus on some coding so bring your laptops, Visual Studios, and fast fingers for a play with REST. We might even get to commit some code back to GitHub!

Hope to see you there,
Paul.

July 2013 – Planning

July 18, 2013 Agile / Aliens / Meeting
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Planning - found via http://search.creativecommons.org/ with google images

Make a plan

Date: Thursday 25th July 2013

Time: 7:00pm

Venue: Staffordshire University – Stafford Campus (K106 – the Octagon building)

 
 
 

After gaining familiarity with the game in last months game play we will make a high level plan (read: just enough planning) of the approach we will take to make the game server side.

We will aim to get the first functionality out to the customer – a minimal marketable feature.

  • What will that be?
  • The best way to achieve it?
  • Bring your ideas and let’s get busy

If you haven’t had chance yet, be sure to read the REST resources that Paul Williams linked to in his recent group post.
 
Hope to see you there,
Neil.

June 2013 – Alien Invasion Replay

June 23, 2013 Agile / Aliens / Refactoring
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Alien Faces Vector Image by Vectorportal, on Flickr Re-coloured

Alien Faces Vector Image by Vectorportal

Date: Thursday 27th June 2013

Time: 7:00pm start (Please note time change)

Venue: Staffordshire University – Stafford Campus (K102 – the Octagon building)

Following last months session kicking off the Alien Invasion refactoring process, we discovered that a deeper and fresher understanding of the gameplay and strategies to defend earth would hopefully lead to a quicker and improved refactoring. After further discussion, we decided the best way to learn the problem domain would be to play the game again. Therefore, June’s session will be to have another go at Alien Invasion; a chance to kick some Alien Butt whilst trying to think how REST or other paradigms could be used to allow the kata to become language agnostic.

We have a live server running, so the pre-requisites for the session will be VS2010, an Nunit compliant test running (NUnit-console, Resharper, NCrunch or others). The distributable game component will be provided on a USB stick.

May 2013 – Back To The Aliens (Take Two)

May 13, 2013 Agile / Aliens / Kanban / Meeting
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Alien Faces Vector Image by Vectorportal, on Flickr Re-coloured

Alien Faces Vector Image by Vectorportal

Date: Thursday 23rd May 2013

Time: 7:00pm start (Please note time change)

Venue: Staffordshire University – Stafford Campus (K102 – the Octagon building)

 

 

This month we will (finally) kick-off the Alien Invasion project.

Code Repository

The repository is a GIT repository and can be found at https://github.com/agilestaffordshire/Alien-Invasion-Coding-Challenge .

To work on the code, begin by forking the repo and checking it out to your local machine.

If your are not familiar with GIT there are some excellent resources at the GIT documentation pages, GitHub and  a number of courses at Code School.

Live Hosting

The site is now hosted at http://aliens.agilestaffordshire.org

Task Management

An AgileStafforshire organisation has been set up at trello. Please set up an account and pass on your account name or email address to be added to the group.

Outline Agenda

  • Definition of initial goals – Where to begin and where do we want to go?
  • Code review – It would be useful to familiarise yourself with the code before the meeting.
  • Characterisation tests – Can \ should we wrap the existing code in tests to avoid regressions?

Hope to see you there,
Neil.

February 2013 – Aliens Kickoff!

February 19, 2013 Agile / Aliens / Meeting
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Alien Faces Vector Image by Vectorportal, on Flickr

Alien Faces Vector Image by Vectorportal

Date: Thursday 28th February 2013

Time: 7:30pm start

Venue: The Stafford Ale House

Location: Google Maps

Alien Invasion Kickoff

This month we will get started on the Alien Invasion project.

The main repository can be found at https://github.com/agilestaffordshire/Alien-Invasion-Coding-Challenge .
To work on the code, begin by forking the repo in your own account and work from there.
Rob Stothard has been added as a collaborator. Ideally at least one more person would be useful. Let me know if you would like to step forward.

Rob has kindly configured and hosted a TeamCity instance. A DNS record has been configured to point to http://teamcity.agilestaffordshire.org. TeamCity is currently configured to watch the Github repository and build on commit.

The site is hosted at http://www.kidd.org.uk/AlienInvasion/. I am currently trying to get a cname of  http://aliens.agilestaffordshire.org working but am experiencing problems. I have contacted the hosting company to see what can be done.

For task management, an AgileStafforshire organisation has been set up at trello. So please set up an account and pass on your account name or email address to be added to the group.

Outline Agenda

  • Code review – It would be useful to familiarise yourself with the code before the meeting
  • Characterisation tests – Can we wrap the existing code in tests to avoid regressions?
  • Add ported code from SqlServer to MySql – The code already exists and just needs committing
  • Definition of initial goals – Where to begin and where do we want to go?

Hope to see you there,
Neil.

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