Winning the Software Architecture YouTube-Video Awards

This week, as part of Software Architecture class, our professor, Alf Inge Wang (inventor and co-founder of Kahoot!), held his annual Software Architecture YouTube-Video Awards.

During the semester, students were placed in groups and were given the task of creating a game for Android or iOS devices. The focus of the project was heavily centered around planning an appropriate architecture, and documenting its implementation. This would teach us the importance of a well designed software architecture with regards to different quality attributes. Each group had to make a video to promote their app, presenting its main features, its architecture and challenges from the development period.

The deadline for the project was last week, so this week we spent the last lecture of the semester eating popcorn, drinking soda and watching the app videos all the groups had created. For each video we watched, we had to give a rating between 1 and 4 (4 being the best). Needless to say, the voting was done using Kahoot!. At the end of the lecture, the video with the highest rating would win.

As you've probably figured out from the title of this post, my group (including fellow steemit user @bartors) won the video award, by a long shot! But before we get to the video, let me present our Android game.

The game is called JankenMaze. Janken is the Japanese term for rock-paper-scissors, and in our game, rock, paper and scissors are chasing each other around a Pac-Man-like maze. The game has a pretty solid architecture which implements several tactics to accommodate modifiability, which is our primary quality attribute. That being said, the game is pretty basic and not that revolutuionary, so the game itself was clearly not the reason for the award.

To grab everyone's attention and capture their hearts, we decided to make our video funny, largely focusing on self-irony. We pretty much presented every flaw, bad design decision and bug we had experienced during development. I believe what made the final video so successful was the way it looked so professional, yet described a product which looked like a lost cause. While watching the video, all the students in the room laughed loudly multiple times, surely wondering how we could be so proud of a non-functioning app. To be fair, though, all the flaws presented in the video were worked out in good time for the final delivery.

One important detail to be aware of to understand the humor in the video: Everyone enrolled in the Software Architecture course dislikes Google Play Games Services. Nearly every group who tried to use it for their project faced major problems and challenges, largely thanks to Google's embarrassingly weak documentation, as well as removal of previously supported features. Let me know what you think of the video. I sat up all night two days in a row making it.

Oh, and we won chocolate.