Creating Apps in Kivy

Chapter 4. Iterative Development

For the most part, I have been designing the weather app you are now building exactly as I would have designed it without you along for the ride. I am a firm believer in iterative development. The basic principle of iterative development is to perform small design changes, one step at a time, such that at the end of each step, you have a working application. It may not be complete in terms of the design requirements, but it is complete in terms of the current version of itself.

Each chapter in this book is a development iteration. This is convenient for me, as an author, because it gives me an end game to focus on for each chapter. However, this is just a lucky coincidence. I hope that you will follow a similar iterative process in developing your own Kivy applications. Indeed, if you really want your iterations to make sense, I advise that your version-control commit messages tell a story, much like this book.

Note

Iterative development is indoctrinated in various formal methodologies of software development. These are useful when you are coordinating development teams, as the more developers a project has, the more communication overhead there is.

If you’re working in a team environment (and you will be, at some point), you might want to search the Web for terms such as extreme programming or Scrum. However, if you’re developing mobile Kivy applications by yourself, you can probably get away with informal iterations and a notebook of ideas.

It’s impossible ...