CSSE 220 – Object-Oriented Software Development

CSSE 220 – Dam Beavers Mini-Project

Overview

For this project you will create a program for playing the game “Dam Beavers”. The objective of the game is to knock down the beaver dam by inflicting damage on it with your “word catapult”. You build words from the random collection of “letter logs” that make up the dam. The bigger the word, or the rarer the letters, the more damage you inflict. But hurry! Your catapult breaks down over time. A free demo of the game is available from Game House. You won’t have to do the animation and sound—though you can certainly try. Your task is to implement the basic game play, including checking spelling of words, adding up the damage inflicted, and reconfiguring the letter logs as they are used.

Administrative Background

Team Assignment

This is a team assignment. My intention is not that you “divide and conquer” as much as that you have people to talk with as you write and test this program.

Everything that you submit for this project should be understood by all team members. It is your responsibility to (a) not submit anything without first discussing it with your teammates, and (b) not let something your teammates write go “over your head” without making a strong effort to understand it (including having a teammate explain it to you, of course).

Team Grading Note

Usually all team members will receive the same score for this assignment. But if there is ample evidence that one person did not fully participate in the learning and the doing, I reserve the right to give different grades. A peer evaluation survey at the end of the project will help me to determine this. If the survey or my observations indicate the need, I may ask you to explain parts of your project to me.

Subversion Repository

Your SVN repository for this assignment is:

    http://svn.cs.rose-hulman.edu/repos/csse220-200910-teamX
where X is your team number given in class. You should check out the DamBeaver project from this repository, and all subsequent work should be placed in this project folder and committed back to your repository.

Deliverables

Milestone dates are listed in the table below. This rest of this section describes the artifacts due at each milestone. Follow the instructions carefully. Your team may want to print a copy of this document, highlight the key things to do, and check them off as you do them.

Project Schedule and Milestones

Cycle 1
Nov. 3–6
Cycle 2
Nov. 5–10
Cycle 3
Nov. 10–12

All due times are start of the class session unless otherwise noted.

Thursday, Nov. 6 CRC Cards, UML Class Diagram, Cycle 1 User Stories and Status Report, Cycle 2 User Stories
Monday, Nov. 10 Cycle 2 Status Report, Cycle 3 User Stories
Wednesday, Nov. 12 Cycle 3 Status Report, Final working code
Wednesday, Nov. 12 (midnight) Team evaluation survey

CRC Cards and UML Class Diagram

You must use the object-oriented design technique discussed in the book and in class to generate CRC Cards and a UML Class Diagram for your project. Name your class with the main() method Main.

Before brainstorming candidate classes, you will probably find it helpful to make some sketches of potential screen layouts for your project. See the Overview section above and the Features section below for additional information on the responsibilities of your program.

You must draw your UML Class Diagram using Violet, available here. Choose File → New → Class Diagram to get started.

To be turned in:

Put your team number on the back of each of your completed CRC Cards and hand them in at the start of class. We’ll check them quickly and hand them back to you. To commit your UML Class Diagram, you’ll add it to your Eclipse project. In Violet, choose Save As to save the file to your Eclipse workspace → DamBeavers → Planning folder. Within Eclipse, right-click the DamBeavers project folder in the Package Explorer view, and choose Refresh. Your Violet file should appear under Planning. Now right-click the project folder again, and choose Team → Commit. Be sure the Violet file is checked so it is added to the repository. Enter an appropriate message and complete the commit.

User Stories

Short development cycles are a key feature of Extreme Programming. This is especially useful for projects where the development team—that’s you—is unfamiliar with the problem to be solved. At the start of each development cycle, the team negotiates with the customer on the work to be accomplished during that cycle.

The customer suggests user stories to be completed. These are short, often one sentence, descriptions of what the user would be able to do with the software. For example,

User launches program and sees a blank drawing area and some buttons representing actions that could be taken.

This story doesn’t say anything about the buttons actually working, so that is not part of this user story. A user story for a button working might be something like,

User clicks the Rectangle button and can then draw a rectangle in the drawing area by clicking and dragging the mouse.

User stories are powerful in two important ways. First, they make it very clear how to test whether the story has been completed. Second, they keep the development team focused on the importance of meeting the needs of the user.

After the customer has suggested some user stories for the cycle, the development team will decide whether it is reasonable to complete them all in the time available. If not, the customer will withdraw some of the proposed stories until an achievable set of stories is agreed upon.

For this assignment you’ll play both the customer role and that of the development team. As a customer, the number of features completed will help determine your grade (and how much fun you have with the project). As a development team, you’ll have to do the work to implement the user stories.

To be turned in:

At the start of each development cycle, you should commit a text document to your project repository listing the user stories that you plan to complete during that cycle. You can use File → New → Untitled Text File to add a new text file to an Eclipse project. Save your file to your Planning folder with a name like “Cycle N User Stories.txt”, where N is the cycle number. Commit the file to your repository.

Status Reports

At the end of each development cycle, you should commit a text document to your project repository indicating either that you completed all of the user stories for the cycle or else listing any user stories the team planned to complete but was not able to. Briefly state any complications that prevented you from completing the stories, for example, “We underestimated how hard it would be to implement mouse dragging.”

Save your file to your Planning folder with a name like “Cycle N Status Report.txt”, where N is the number of the cycle just completed. Commit the file to your repository.

Final Working Code

We’ll grade the version of your code committed to your repository at the final-working-code deadline. Your code should be well-commented and should use appropriate class, method, field, and variable names. No Eclipse warnings should remain for your final code.

If there are aspects of your classes that can be tested apart from the GUI, then you should provide JUnit tests for those features.

Some comments on Subversion and team projects:

Commit your code often. And don’t forget to update your code before working and before committing. The chances of SVN conflicts grow exponentially with the number of team members, but they decrease with the number of lines of code in the project. The net result is that you’ll have more trouble at the beginning of a project. For this reason it makes a lot of sense to carefully work on completely different classes in the beginning.

Team Evaluation

We will post a team evaluation survey on ANGEL. You will receive individual points for completing the survey. I will also use the survey results to help decide whether to give different assignment scores to different team members. Perhaps most importantly, the survey results will help me identify where you are doing well as a teammate and where you can improve.

Features

The subsequent subsections list the features that your program is required to have and some potential additional features. I’ve tried to leave the requirements fairly open so that you can be creative.

This is the first time I’ve assigned this project, so I’m not sure what to expect. At this point, my thought is that an “A” project would include all of the required features and additional features. A team that delivers all of the milestones, well done and on time, and produces a project that correctly implements all the required features will earn at least 75% on this assignment.

Required Features

A successful program must include all of the following features:

Additional Features

Once your team completes the required features, you should try to complete as many of these additional features as time permits.

Bonus Features

If your team completes all of the required and additional features above, then you can implement bonus features of your own choosing. I’ll only award bonus points for these if all of the required and additional features are also implemented correctly.