Goals

• Apply and adapt programming practices so that you achieve maximum value in simulated market conditions.
• Share experiences on programming practices and learn from others.
• Have fun while coding!

The softwarewolves coding contest aims to simulate real world conditions to provide a safe platform for experimenting with technology choices and development practices.

During a contest, we create a hypothetical market place for bots that play the well-known werewolves party game. The session organizers have defined functionality for bots that they are prepared to 'pay' for. If and when this functionality is demonstrated, the team that delivers it is awarded the published price.

Prerequisites

• Bring your computer
• A chat client that supports xmpp, such as Pidgin, Adium, etc.
• A development environment, preferably for Java, .Net, Ruby or Node.js as we provide a basic bot to start from in these technologies. Prior knowledge of xmpp is not required!

Day program

Participants are encouraged to work in pairs. Each pair can choose their own technology and approach. This is not a tutorial, so the organizers will not claim to know the best way to do this. Rather, this is intended a platform to try out new ideas and share experiences.

• 13:00 Introduction to game and stories, how to get started, team formation
• 13:15 Dev Iteration
• 14:00 Demo and retrospective
• 14:30 Break
• 14:45 Dev iteration
• 15:30 Demo and retrospective
• 16:00 Break
• 16:15 Dev iteration
• 17:00 Demo and retrospective
• 17:30 Break
• 17:45 Dev iteration
• 18:30 Demo and retrospective
• 18:45 Closing + reflection on what was learned

At the end of the day, the team who got the highest score wins and gets rewarded with some choice Belgian chocolates. The program will finish by 7 PM.

Retrospectives

The goals of the retrospectives are:

• What is your secret (selecting the story, setup and dev approach)?
• Sharing experiences (what went well, what did not go well)?
• What are you going to change in the next iteration?

Documentation overview

This project contains the following documentation:

• [Getting started.md](Getting started.md): a few lines to get you started.
• Gameplay.md: this file describes the rules of the game. This includes the "magic strings" (messages that trigger the behavior in the game).
• [Sample transcript.txt](Sample transcript.txt): this file contains the transcript of a sample game.
• Technology.md: this file describes the technology underpinning the game.
• [Acceptance procedure.md](Acceptance procedure.md): the procedure for getting your implemented user stories accepted by the product owner.