I. Components:

A. Module Tiles – users connect random tiles taken from a bag (like Alhambra) to represent modules of the application. (It’s random because we’re simulating the random whims of a fickle-minded client.)

1. Screens 2. Presentation Layer Module 3. [...]]]> After playing some eurogames and taking the suggestions from the BoardGameGeek thread, here is what I have so far:

I. Components:

A. Module Tiles – users connect random tiles taken from a bag (like Alhambra) to represent modules of the application. (It’s random because we’re simulating the random whims of a fickle-minded client.)

1. Screens
2. Presentation Layer Module
3. Business Layer Module
4. Data Access Layer Module
5. Database
6. Services Module
7. Reports

B. Time Unit Counters – represents amount of time available for budgeting. There is a fixed number of counters available per human resource per turn.

C. Quality Counters – represents completed work and the quality of the work. These are placed on the module tiles after each round based on the activities performed. Up to 6 of each type of quality counters may be added to each module. They serve as “defence” against negative incident cards.

1. R – Requirements
2. FD – Functional Design
3. TD – Technical Design
4. C – Code
5. TC – Tested Code

D. Defect Counters – represents defects found (added from “bug” incident cards) If defect for the module reaches 10, all quality counters are taken away, representing rework from scratch. These are added either by incidents or by careless resources.

E. Activity Board – Depicting an office scene (cubicle farm!), it contains sections that represent specific activities performed by the team (similar to Stone Age). Players use time unit counters and allocate them to activity areas.

1. Requirements
2. Functional Design
3. Technical Design
4. Development
New Code
Bug Fix
Refactor
5. QA Test
6. UAT Test
7. Deploy
8. Implement Tool / Process

F. Manpower Cards – represents resources. These cards are placeholders for time unit counters at the start of each turn. Manpower have ratings for specific activities, and they represent the number of quality counters that may be added for every time unit spent:
1. Analysis
2. Design
3. Code
4. Test

They may also have special abilities. Examples:
1. System Administration – exempting from system incidents
2. Client Relationship
3. Tools Experience – minus one time requirement when installing a new technology
4. Refactoring – minus one time requirement when performing refactoring*

*Refactoring may be a prerequisite when applying a new technology. It must be applied across all modules covered by the technology. Refactoring work is represented by a defect counter added to the module.

G. Tools and Technology Tiles – represents tools, techniques, architectural additions They provide improvements such as additional quality counters per unit of work, or exemption from negative incidents. A technology tree relates the tools and technologies to their prerequisites.

1. IDE
2. Static Code Analysis
3. Unit Testing Framework
4. Continuous Integration
5. Bug Testing Tool
6. Source Code Repository
7. ORM Framework
8. Presentation Framework
9. IOC Container
10. UI Widgets Library
11. Business/Data Library
12. Configuration Library
13. Logging and Error Handling Library
14. Security Library
15. Enterprise Framework
16. Project Management System
17. Modelling Tool
18. Document Management System

H. Incident Cards – represents events that may occur when developing the application. Incident cards also act as a game clock. It ends when there are no cards left.

Examples:
1. Sick Leave – choose a resource and eliminate all time units for this turn
2. Tool Downtime – choose a technology tile and turn it over. It provides no bonus for the next 2 rounds.
3. Network Problem – deduct time counters for this round unless a resource has System Administration ability.
4. Level I/II/III Bug – choose 1/2/3 modules and roll 1/2/3 dice. If the dice result is greater than the quality counters, add that number of defects to the modules.

I. SDLC Board – one board per player, it indicates the development path of the project and times the addition of new module tiles; highlights milestones, each representing victory points. These will contain special instructions specific to the methodology represented by the board, such as waterfall (all module tiles are available, but players may only move to the next phase once all modules are complete for that phase) or agile (module tiles are taken a fixed number at a time, and complete them before going to the next one.)

J. Budget Cards – 10 cards are provided to each player at the start of the game. It allows you to do any of the following:

1. Temporarily add resources for one round
2. Acquire new technology with no additional cost

Budget cards count for additional points for completed projects

II. Game Play

A. Organize – check for milestones in SDLC board and perform indicated task (such as get a new module tile)

B. Apply Additional Budget (optional)

C. Distribute Time Unit Counters to Activities / Technologies

D. Apply Quality Counters

E. Pick an Incident Card and choose to keep or play Mr. Murphy (apply effect to the player to your left)

F. Return all Time Unit Counters to Resource

Strategic Play

The elements allow strategies that involve time, scope, cost and quality.

For instance:
- sacrifice quality by moving to the next phase / module without additional development review / testing work, at the risk of getting bugs by incident cards
- increase cost using budget cards to get temporary resource / new technologies to speed up the work
- reduce scope. Sacrifice some victory points related to number of deployed modules in exchange for more time to produce better quality work.

Players will also be made to choose whether to spend time developing frameworks, improving processes or installing technology tools, or just devote more time to pure development work.

Prism, A Look Ahead

Of all the listed focus items for the Prism update, I’m excited about MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) the most. [...]]]> With the upcoming release of Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4.0, naturally my thoughts went to the future of Prism. The Simplifying patterns & practices blog posted an entry of what is in store.

Prism, A Look Ahead

Of all the listed focus items for the Prism update, I’m excited about MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) the most. I would like to use MEF directly as well in my ERP Framework, Orchestra, and it all fits perfectly with Prism using it as well.

The only downside is that the planned release of Prism 4.0 is September, 2010. It will be a 6 month wait, so what do I do in the meantime? I will probably focus in getting ProtoStack launched first, being independent of Prism. For Orchestra, sitting on top of ProtoStack, I think I will also be working on the business layer first, looking at the best way to structure the foundations of the financial, sales and inventory modules, keeping them loosely coupled to allow MEF to be the glue between them later on.

That also means I will only have postpone any work on Orchestra’s presentation layer until Prism 4.0’s launch, instead using very simple UI prototypes to test the underlying business layer.

I’m also considering targeting the ERP framework to be presented in both ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight.

(As an aside, there is also a new .Net 4.0 poster now. It’s a welcome addition to my list of free posters in a previous post. http://download.microsoft.com/download/E/6/A/E6A8A715-7695-493C-8CFA-8E0C23A4BE1D/098-115952-NETFX4-Poster.pdf)

I may even organize my ProtoStack / Orchestra ERP namespaces into something like DomainModel, DomainServices, ApplicationServices.

Also, I am considering a process where data layer integration is developed later in the [...]]]> I am taking cue from Jeffrey Palermo’s Onion Architecture. It is designed with the premise that infrastructure changes over time and so should be external to the application’s core.

I may even organize my ProtoStack / Orchestra ERP namespaces into something like DomainModel, DomainServices, ApplicationServices.

Also, I am considering a process where data layer integration is developed later in the project. I’ll start with building the core, interfacing with a fake data layer (all in-memory typed collections) followed by the UI.

It got me thinking whether it was also possible to represent certain aspects of executing a software project via a boardgame and make it fun.

Here are a few things that I have come up [...]]]> I recently got interested in financial board games and saw how they can be very useful in educating children about certain concepts.

It got me thinking whether it was also possible to represent certain aspects of executing a software project via a boardgame and make it fun.

Here are a few things that I have come up so far:

• Human resources and tools / techniques are represented as cards.

• Requirements are also represented as cards, which are dealt equally to each player, and the objective is to move all requirement cards through an “SDLC” board (one per player) that represent a series of squares grouped according to phases (design all the way to deployment)

• The passage of time is represented in a main square board like monopoly, and completing a trip around the board (passing “Go”) allows the player to move each of the requirement cards a number of steps through the SDLC board depending on the capability of the resource cards (senior programmer allows one requirement to move two squares in the dev phase, junior programmer only one, etc.)

• Players will start with play money representing the project budget, and at every pass at “Go” is payday. The player is out of the game if he runs out of funds.

• The main board also has “chance” / “risk” cards, which represent things that can mess up a project. damage is applied at the roll of a die, and chance modifiers depend on whether the user has “bought” tools / techniques.

I haven’t implemented this idea yet as I’m still looking at more play elements that can make the game more engaging, as well as soliciting for more ideas.

I am planning to release this under Creative Commons license but haven’t decided on the exact license yet.

Any more game play suggestions are welcome.

UPDATE: There is now an active thread about this in BoardGameGeek. http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/4448368

With all these color changes, I thought that my Innogetics logo was getting dated, so I gave it a color change as well.

.Net Framework 4 Universe http://blogs.msdn.com/ericnel/archive/2008/10/31/net-framework-3-5-sp1-and-4-0-poster-available.aspx

.Net 3.5 Framework Types and Namespaces http://blogs.msdn.com/pandrew/archive/2007/11/02/announcing-the-net-framework-3-5-commonly-used-types-and-namespaces-poster.aspx

Application Architecture Guide 2.0 http://www.pnpguidance.net/post/DownloadApplicationArchitectureGuide2PosterPatternsPractices.aspx

The Infamous Project Cartoon http://www.projectcartoon.com

Agile Development Poster http://pm.versionone.com/AgilePoster.html

Mother Tongues of Computer Languages http://www.digibarn.com/collections/posters/tongues/

UML 2.0 by Example http://www.ss.com.au/articles/

Designing the User Experience UPA Poster http://www.mprove.de/script/00/upa/_media/upaposter_11×17.pdf

Non-Free / Non-Technical Posters

For the heck of it, I’ll also buy [...]]]> If I had my own .Net development shop, I’ll probably have these free posters adorning our walls.

.Net Framework 4 Universe
http://blogs.msdn.com/ericnel/archive/2008/10/31/net-framework-3-5-sp1-and-4-0-poster-available.aspx

.Net 3.5 Framework Types and Namespaces
http://blogs.msdn.com/pandrew/archive/2007/11/02/announcing-the-net-framework-3-5-commonly-used-types-and-namespaces-poster.aspx

Application Architecture Guide 2.0
http://www.pnpguidance.net/post/DownloadApplicationArchitectureGuide2PosterPatternsPractices.aspx

The Infamous Project Cartoon
http://www.projectcartoon.com

Agile Development Poster
http://pm.versionone.com/AgilePoster.html

Mother Tongues of Computer Languages
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/posters/tongues/

UML 2.0 by Example
http://www.ss.com.au/articles/

Designing the User Experience UPA Poster
http://www.mprove.de/script/00/upa/_media/upaposter_11×17.pdf

Non-Free / Non-Technical Posters

For the heck of it, I’ll also buy these too:

• Head First Design Patterns Poster – http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596102143
• CMMI for Dev 1.2 – http://www.wibas.com/products/cmmi/cmmi_dev_poster/index_en.html
• Softhouse’s Scrum Poster – http://www.softhouse.se/dynamic.asp?levels_id=184&link=7&mall=2&parent=10
• Financial Accounting Posters (to help devs grok the domain we’re going to be dealing with) - http://tutor2u.net/acatalog/Business_Studies_Accounting_Financial_Accounting_Posters.html and/or http://www.graphiceducation.com.au/product.php?id_product=10
• Foobar Poster (just for fun) - http://shop.eboy.com/products/foobar-poster
• Vintage IBM Accounting Poster – http://www.amazon.com/1948-Punched-Accounting-Machine-Print/dp/B001NPIDWI/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=home-garden&qid=1255664831&sr=1-3
• Young Bill Gates – http://www.amazon.com/Microsofts-Bill-Gates-Poster-Magazine/dp/B000H1GMUY/ref=sr_1_29?ie=UTF8&s=home-garden&qid=1255664989&sr=1-29