The Gaming Room design document
- Briefly summarize The Gaming Room client and their software requirements. Who was the client? What type of software did they want you to design?
The Gaming Room has an existing game avialble on android app only at the moment and do not know how to setup an environment that will allow for multiple platforms to play their game. They've asked to create a web-based game so that multiple platforms can play the game. More specifically the requirements are:
- A game will have the ability to have one or more teams involved.
- Each team will have multiple players assigned to it.
- Game and team names must be unique to allow users to check whether a name is in use when choosing a team name.
- Only one instance of the game can exist in memory at any given time. This can be accomplished by creating unique identifiers for each instance of a game, team, or player.
- What did you do particularly well in developing this documentation?
I think what I did well although it may not show well in the document is research. I felt as though I re-read the chapters twice to find specific detail when writing the recommendation and the evaluation. In addition, I did several online searches myself to get more opinions and perspectives related to the topics at hand.
- What about the process of working through a design document did you find helpful when developing the code?
The UML is absolutely the most impactful item in the design document when developing the code. The other items in the document seemed to do more with architecture before coding would begin. The UML helped provide guidance about how the classes needed to be setup, what attributes were private/public, and how the functions should be available. The UML functions a lot like an outline when you're writing a paper.
- If you could choose one part of your work on these documents to revise, what would you pick? How would you improve it?
It would be around the evaluation section. Even though I did do a lot of research both within our book and through the web, I still feel as though there are gaps. I can't tell if I truely addressed the problems or questions in full or not. I can imagine having a template that asked directed questions.
- How did you interpret the user’s needs and implement them into your software design? Why is it so important to consider the user’s needs when designing?
The user's needs were mostly addressed around memory management and distributed systems and networks. Memory management ensured that the experience the user is expecting is addressed regarding image render/load rates. Distributed systems/network addressed needs for accessing connectivity and outages.
- How did you approach designing software? What techniques or strategies would you use in the future to analyze and design a similar software application?
Mostly referencing the reading we had in our course and looking up examples online. Being able to reference those architectual designs was great to determine which one best solved the problem at hand. Now simply knowing the names, googling them will be easy enough to reference for future needs.