S.D.L.C - Software Development Life Cycle

[IronS3]

SDLC – Software Development Life Cycle

In view of the recent but not over yet Hall-Of-Fame event, it is with great surprise that despite this event has been broadcasted for nearly a month (from start till end of event), it is still able to mess up and still unable to pull off a smooth execution.

Therefore it leads to my thinking that whichever company or group of people that are incharge of implementing such a program / event, has to be really made aware of or be taught of SDLC. You guys are, after all a software company, having software needed to be developed and implemented.

So let’s begin.

As the title already suggested – SDLC stands for software development life cycle. It is a process that a good software development company or group of people adopts so to ensure whatever it is that you’re trying to implement, comes out being implemented correctly, and most of all bug free.

There are a number of SDLC models available that are widely adopted as well, let’s choose a simple one – The Waterfall model.
In the Waterfall model, you do your software thing following these phases:
1. Requirement gathering
2. Design
3. Implementation / Construction
4. Verification / Testing
5. Maintenance (might not be applicable in the case of HoF event).

Requirement Gathering
You gather your requirements. In this case of HoF, is to reward players whom BR at the end of the event (27/Nov) having 250k / 300k / 350k / 400k / 450k accordingly on the various items depending on which tier they stand, along with the lower tiers etc etc etc. This I “think” you guys might already have, else the HoF won’t even be here. So kudos – you have your requirements defined (sort of).

Design
You design your programs (note: design only, no coding yet). This is the time you think through on how you want to implement this requirement that you’ve defined above. When will you do it, at which juncture, and how many processes involved etc etc etc. Failing in this, you will fail the following section, and as a whole failing the meet the requirement. If you’re doing this correctly, you would’ve stuff like flow-charts, pseudo codes, process-flows etc etc in place to supplement the design.

Implementation / Construction
This is the time you do your coding. The coding is based on the “Design” that you’ve defined earlier which is of course having the objective to meet the requirements. People who do stuff in this phase, usually should not be the same people who do the design, and neither do they need to understand the design. Just code based on the given blueprints.

Verifications / Testing
This is the interesting part. It is the mother of all cupcakes if you don’t do it. Whatever it is that you’ve designed and coded in hope to achieve the requirement, MUST be verified whether or not it works in this phase. You short-cut this one, you end up with cupcakes. This is guaranteed.
You must only deploy stuff into a live environment once the software that you’ve made passed through this stage and gives an accurate result / outcome. If this one fails due to whatsoever reason, trace back to the stage above this one, and review it again all the way from coding then onto design once more if need be.

So finally – once you gone through the 4 stages above, and assuming all 4 stages are completed to satisfactory result, you put it to live environment. When the time comes, just push the button and voila – event completed, everyone’s happy, no surprises.

I don’t know which stage did you not do, or rather if you have any of such practice at all.

I took 25 mins to type out all the above in a Microsoft Word document, and pasted it into the forum.
At best, I think if you have someone doing this for you in your organization, it will probably that a week to iron through the requirements to design. Coding 2 weeks. Testing 1 week. Done. After all the requirement is not THAT complicated IMO.

So the next time when you wanna implement some event of such, please, for the sake of your mods / GMs / ticketing system and most of all your entire player community – do try to follow the SDLC. It saves life.

And yep, I have some free time today to type all these out. Thank you for reading.

[Fherlayt]

I can tell you what the problem is.

The very same what I have seen with other similar Chinese games.

Great, geniue game designers and programmers are rare like hell, even in China. So, there are a few such geniues, who design and make an excellent game, like Wartune. Wartune at start was a masterpiece, relatively bug-free, fun to play. It was a huge success, bring a lot of money. These designers/programmers got their payment and keep getting their royalty, so they move to a new project. The wel-oiled money-making machine's upkeep is tossed to second-tier programmers who are not only less skilled as the original ones, but also have to struggle with a code someone else made. And here comes the problem. Design loses coherency, bugs are no longer corrected and more are added with each patch. At this stage, the owners see that it is going to fall apart, so they scape forward: more and bigger sales, and only events which cost more money. You see, features like you have to click reward 30.000 times, or sylph skills randomly replaced, or events messed up daily, these things are not corrected for months, or forever. A typical sign that the game is no longer run by the same people who made it originally. Let's hope it does not get into the next phase like other similar games, ie. database crashes and data losses, and insiders / friends of insiders adding resources to their characters freely, ruining the game.

[IronS3]

[ATTACH=CONFIG]116898[/ATTACH]

what a friendly looking guy

he must be the full staff team

Is this you at work ? lol

[IronS3]

Hello.
Very nice read I have to say.The model you were talking about is not implemented in coding only,it has various applications.
If you want my personal opinion,this topic belongs in the suggestions section.
On another note,I think(but not very sure about it,and it's just my personal opinion) that the steps above can't be completed by R2,because R2 is a publisher,they are not developing Wartune.
On yet another note,the waterfall model is not the only model to be used for such implementations.The devs might simply use another for various reasons.But since this information is obviously not available,it would be hard to comment on.

As a final note,I hope this topic could catch the right eyes,and that events will go smooth.
Have a nice day.

Yep there are lotsa SDLC models available. Am just picking 1 for example purposes.
While i might understand R2 is not the original developer per-say on the game or probably some events, but I think they do have the ability to test things out before it goes live.
Such as this HoF, even though their supplier (or whatever it's called, PC?) provided them a crappy software, people don't just take and use without trying it out first.

So if there's 0 testing being conducted, definitely it is a cupcake situation.
Players got upset (for sure), mods / G.M.s got shouted at, and the ticketing system bloats up by thousands of tickets.

And they have roughly a month from the time HoF was announced, to the time to take in the data for processing.
Within that whole month, no one catches the problem that causes whatever this current situation we're facing with? This is what I find un-real especially when you're dealing with software which is totally test-able.

Anyway thank you for the feedbacks.

[Brutal_Hobo]

yeah they do sorta just search google for ''R2games careers.

what a friendly looking guy

he must be the full staff team

[Ashmedia]

I think they have an employes recrute section... kabam has it the last game i played there, i dont know if the lic owner Prof City has that option, but i think the main reazon thing goes wrong is becouse they are to busy being creative about how to play their farm whales cc game than making this game reazonable to most of players.

yeah they do sorta just search google for ''R2games careers.

[AkumaDeDiablo]

you idiot
doing something to benefit the players
you must be smoking crack

All the R2staff that cared for the players are no longer an R2staff, so whats your problem, its just something i would like to state out here, since people dont know about it especially the newer staff.

[Nox03]

Looks like they are not able to go back to the basics and start agile programming.
or.. they took a wrong turn somewhere!

Basis of the game is good, from the implementing of cloud city things went wrong.
an other milestone of failure is the miniclient and i dont want to talk about xserver gb
this was real bad coding!

[GingerTheHutt]

i bet my Cupcake

You can keep your ***. I aint taking the wager.

[SoNasTy]

they get the patches from chinese i bet my Cupcake they get all from them and they broke switching drop rates prices rewards

[Brutal_Hobo]

You know R2 has a test server that isnt listed for the public, and they could alsways tested on their first, but i do not know if they have used that to test the more recent stuff.

you idiot
doing something to benefit the players
you must be smoking crack

[laba-laba]

They are not a software company, they don't make the game.
Closest thing is marketing company, that's all their interest is, selling events.
There is no testing in marketing, salesman feel good if they can sell a broken product.
If it's broken, just send it back to manufacturer and they move on to next event.
Only maintenance they need is keeping the ads up.

For HoF example, they are doing what any good salesman do, white lie here there.
R2 may not be aware of the game limitations, but procity ought to.
Maybe Procity doesnt tell everything to R2, or maybe R2 is on it too.
Who knows the politics between those, give me a headache just like ur tldr.

[AkumaDeDiablo]

You know R2 has a test server that isnt listed for the public, and they could alsways tested on their first, but i do not know if they have used that to test the more recent stuff.

[Xander.]

SDLC – Software Development Life Cycle

In view of the recent but not over yet Hall-Of-Fame event, it is with great surprise that despite this event has been broadcasted for nearly a month (from start till end of event), it is still able to mess up and still unable to pull off a smooth execution.

Therefore it leads to my thinking that whichever company or group of people that are incharge of implementing such a program / event, has to be really made aware of or be taught of SDLC. You guys are, after all a software company, having software needed to be developed and implemented.

So let’s begin.

As the title already suggested – SDLC stands for software development life cycle. It is a process that a good software development company or group of people adopts so to ensure whatever it is that you’re trying to implement, comes out being implemented correctly, and most of all bug free.

There are a number of SDLC models available that are widely adopted as well, let’s choose a simple one – The Waterfall model.
In the Waterfall model, you do your software thing following these phases:
1. Requirement gathering
2. Design
3. Implementation / Construction
4. Verification / Testing
5. Maintenance (might not be applicable in the case of HoF event).

Requirement Gathering
You gather your requirements. In this case of HoF, is to reward players whom BR at the end of the event (27/Nov) having 250k / 300k / 350k / 400k / 450k accordingly on the various items depending on which tier they stand, along with the lower tiers etc etc etc. This I “think” you guys might already have, else the HoF won’t even be here. So kudos – you have your requirements defined (sort of).

Design
You design your programs (note: design only, no coding yet). This is the time you think through on how you want to implement this requirement that you’ve defined above. When will you do it, at which juncture, and how many processes involved etc etc etc. Failing in this, you will fail the following section, and as a whole failing the meet the requirement. If you’re doing this correctly, you would’ve stuff like flow-charts, pseudo codes, process-flows etc etc in place to supplement the design.

Implementation / Construction
This is the time you do your coding. The coding is based on the “Design” that you’ve defined earlier which is of course having the objective to meet the requirements. People who do stuff in this phase, usually should not be the same people who do the design, and neither do they need to understand the design. Just code based on the given blueprints.

Verifications / Testing
This is the interesting part. It is the mother of all cupcakes if you don’t do it. Whatever it is that you’ve designed and coded in hope to achieve the requirement, MUST be verified whether or not it works in this phase. You short-cut this one, you end up with cupcakes. This is guaranteed.
You must only deploy stuff into a live environment once the software that you’ve made passed through this stage and gives an accurate result / outcome. If this one fails due to whatsoever reason, trace back to the stage above this one, and review it again all the way from coding then onto design once more if need be.

So finally – once you gone through the 4 stages above, and assuming all 4 stages are completed to satisfactory result, you put it to live environment. When the time comes, just push the button and voila – event completed, everyone’s happy, no surprises.

I don’t know which stage did you not do, or rather if you have any of such practice at all.

I took 25 mins to type out all the above in a Microsoft Word document, and pasted it into the forum.
At best, I think if you have someone doing this for you in your organization, it will probably that a week to iron through the requirements to design. Coding 2 weeks. Testing 1 week. Done. After all the requirement is not THAT complicated IMO.

So the next time when you wanna implement some event of such, please, for the sake of your mods / GMs / ticketing system and most of all your entire player community – do try to follow the SDLC. It saves life.

And yep, I have some free time today to type all these out. Thank you for reading.

Hello.
Very nice read I have to say.The model you were talking about is not implemented in coding only,it has various applications.
If you want my personal opinion,this topic belongs in the suggestions section.
On another note,I think(but not very sure about it,and it's just my personal opinion) that the steps above can't be completed by R2,because R2 is a publisher,they are not developing Wartune.
On yet another note,the waterfall model is not the only model to be used for such implementations.The devs might simply use another for various reasons.But since this information is obviously not available,it would be hard to comment on.

As a final note,I hope this topic could catch the right eyes,and that events will go smooth.
Have a nice day.

[Linkoneusc]

I think they have an employes recrute section... kabam has it the last game i played there, i dont know if the lic owner Prof City has that option, but i think the main reazon thing goes wrong is becouse they are to busy being creative about how to play their farm whales cc game than making this game reazonable to most of players.