The whole story started at a usual team meeting. There was a discussion about using Gartner’s toolkit for Application Fitness and Value Review . There was not much enthusiasm filling out another excel sheet. Someone mentioned that it would be more fun to do it with an App. A few jokes went around if it can be done in a weekend for a bottle of wine, and then we just moved on.

Challenge accepted

I thought it would be inspirational to my fellow architects if I could make this happen. Here is the story of a weekend and a Coding night @Zmags .

The product

It is all about evaluating a list of applications against certain set of smart criteria with rating, than visualise the result on a chart. So there is a list of application, a questionnaire, a rating between 1 and 5, some smart algorithm, and a chart. That’s it!

Warning — Scope creep!

Than I started thinking about if this app could be a SaaS product. Could it be that companies maintaining their application portofolio fitness here? Can Gartner offer this as a service? And than I just went amok on features. Added authentication, web interface, Import / export and API, payment. What could give it more added value? Let’s have a timemachine-like history.

Oh and lets add authentication, and registration so the app can be sold as SaaS. Let’s make a full-scale application portfolio management extension etc.

Speaking of timeframe

I had a weekend plus a coding meetup @Zmags + commuting time. I made a total 6 hours at weekend (Not bad with two small kids :) ) + 6 hours at the meetup + 1 hour on the train. It was ca. 13 hours of pure coding fun.

The Research

So I had to find out how to make the app. Here you can see the process and the results in telegramm style:

The results

• Infinite Scroll with custom UIPageViewController and swipe for filter data on tableview. thx to @igroomgrim
• Star rating thx to @shuhrat10
• Charts

The Pods

use_frameworks!  
target 'gartner-application-fitness' do  
  pod 'Alamofire',   
  pod 'SwiftyJSON',  
  pod 'STRatingControl'  
  pod 'FontAwesome.swift'  
  pod 'Charts'  
end

Coding

Yes, I clearly haven’t done any TDD or BDD on this. It was a pure “It should work on the first run” coding.

The Contribution

I couldn’t find a star rating control that can work together with UITableCellView. No problem, lets find something close to and contribute. This is the best thing about Open Source!

The aftermath

Coding is pure fun! I have demoed the app at the next team meeting. I’ve made a proof of concept. It is impressive how much can be done nowadays.