This is one in a series of articles about Time Tortoise, a Universal Windows Platform app for planning and tracking your work schedule. For more on the development of this app and the ideas behind it, see my Time Tortoise category page.

Incremental Build Model

Last week I made my first commit to the GitHub repository for Time Tortoise, the app that I’m working on this year.

I publish a blog post every Wednesday, so I have adopted that schedule for this project as well. In general, each blog post is associated with a GitHub commit. In the first few weeks of the year, I used example UWP projects to experiment with a few ideas. Starting last week, my commits have been adding functionality to the Time Tortoise app itself.

This approach is an example of the incremental build model of software development. The idea is to start with a small working program and build it over time through a series of small (incremental) improvements. After each increment, the program remains usable, and it has slightly more functionality.

In agile terms, I’m building Time Tortoise using a series of one-week sprints, with a release at the end of each sprint. Since the project team consists of one very part-time developer (me), the scope of each sprint is small. But thanks to the incremental build model, it will add up to something useful over time.

The scope for this week: create, update, and list activity names.

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Since the beginning of the year, I have been doing some research for a project related to time tracking. As part of the research, I build a tiny sample app to try out the technology stack that I’ll be using.

This week, I’m making my first few commits to the GitHub repository that I’ll be using for the real app. The app also now has a name, Time Tortoise, and a logo, the stern-looking creature at the top of this post.

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Last week, I wrote about the basics of unit testing UWP apps, including steps required to get xUnit.net and code coverage working together. This week, I’ll cover a few more unit testing topics related to testing components in isolation. That will wrap up the UWP example app that I have been building over the last few weeks.

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Before I start actually building my time tracking app, I have one more topic to cover: unit testing. I’ll tackle it in two parts, one this week and one next week.

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