Week 3: Honours Project

Meeting 3

• The formal meeting and specification form shall be completed next week
• I got my moderator - Dr Mark Stansfield in room E211
• I was advised by Dr John to seek the libraries outside of Paisley campus for a wider and more appropriate select of books on the area of AGILE 
• The Phd Student sitting in with us at the meeting gave advice on taking the research to the next step for a 1st class Honours (I could create my own pattern/method of dev in agile)
• Dr John said to email him chapters of the literature review and he gave advice on the subject.

I now have my dissertation title, broken down to a basic question of intent: 

 "What are issues of Agile software development when creating a HTML5 game for Ipad2"

Now, from where I left off last time, last Tuesday I still had problems with the menu acting strangely with the physics. I found my fist bug in the game engine and had to collaborate with the creator - Brandon from the modulus team - to help resolve it. He was very helpful and provided me with a solution to my problem. What was happening was when the engine game loop performed an update for the game, the physics attributes applied to my menu sprite. Although I disabled the physics globally, the engine ignored this and I was unable to make manual adjustments to the sprites position as they will always be overridden by the physics classes. Thus the physics properties assigned to my sprite actually reacted via the physics and set it back to it's original position over and over again hence why I couldn't amend it's x coordinate. How I got around this was to disable the physics on the sprite locally.

My lead game tester Jof helped with confirming that all the coding worked again and it sure did. He was kind enough to send on screen dumps. (see below)

I had a review of my progress so far on the 04/10/12 and referred to my gant chart. I seen that I was almost on track with the analysis stage of software development: I knew my dissertation question, I thought about a backup plan for my project it things fail to work out using risk management, I have priorities my tasks and plan well in advance. The project was also deemed feasible by my supervisor. I done a bit of reading on Agile software development by Alistair Cockburn and got some quotes from his book and noted them in a document i'm storing with potential citations. On the 05/10/12 as I already stated above, I emailed the game engine creators modulous team to inquire about an issue I was haivng with the physics (he works in USA, Ohio which is 5 hours behind the UK which is a factor I should take note of just incase I may require some advice latter on in the games build.

I coincidentally found my moderator whilst taking off on a journey to find his room and ran into him. He offered to have a meeting with me and we talked over my project proposal. I showed him my hard copy documentation and he advised me to 'firm-up' the details of the project. This shall be done during this week via email and verified, signed and stamped next week at the formal meeting. 

Week 3 was a certain success in my opinion regarding what I set out to achieve and I am a lot happier about the development. My next plans are to type and get creating, reading and also document my results.

Onwards and upwards...

#10 "Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential.", The bible according to AGILE