This weekend I finally created the repository for my project (around a week behind some of my peers, but my emphasis has been on clarifying requirements, not jumping into code).
Roughly, I’m following a three-stage requirements-gathering process:
- Informal requirements specification, gleaned from my early supervisor meetings.
- Cucumber features encompassing all of the above requirements, allowing me to code a corresponding regression test and make the requirements executable.
- Agile stories encompassing the above requirements (at times duplicating the Cucumber features), representing units of work that need to be completed in a sprint. I’m hoping to follow the XP-style process of prioritising which stories go into which sprints, by estimating the effort involved for each story and getting the stakeholders to decide on the value presented by each story, and therefore which stories should be tackled first.
The first step is done (requirements can be inferred from my “Clarifying requirements” blog post). From that, I’ve tried to translate a timeline of theoretical events into explicit features that can be signed off and translated into code. There are currently 19 “@TODO” tags (the account_creation.feature file is a good example of this), each of which is a question or ambiguity raised from inadequately detailed requirements.
I’d like to get the questions answered and the feature files signed off by the stakeholders in this project before I write any code. In the meantime, I still need to read the Maritime Law documents fully and examine libraries and frameworks I could use as a basis for my project.
