A few word count fixes in this release.
When a chapter was archived or deleted, the word counts for the parent part and novel were not updated to reflect the change. Separately, deleting a scene also failed to update the word count of its parent chapter, part, or novel. Archiving and restoring scenes were already working correctly.
These issues are now fixed.
A small but important bug fix today. When you register a new account, the application must redirect you to the login page. During Phase 1 test run 1, I found it logged you straight into the application. Version v0.4.1 rectifies this issue.
Version v0.4.0 marks the final feature release for Phase 1 with the implementation of FEAT-0226 “Unarchive scene”. Archived scenes can now be displayed as cards on a dashboard and restored back to their original chapter.
A somewhat larger patch (some might argue “feature”) this time around that focused on standardizing the layout and styling of the cards that are used to navigate between elements in the application. All cards in the novel structure now feature Edit, Archive, and Delete buttons. The cards in the planning modules (Characters, Locations, and Items) just have an Edit button for now. The Archive and Delete features are not included in Phase 1. Finally, you can now drag-and-drop to reorder all cards on all boards.
After the Phase 1, Run 1 testing there are quite a number of things that need fixing before we can move forward to a run-2 test phase. The work to do falls into these categories:
There are three phase-1 features that escaped implementation. These are:
These missing features were responsible for many of the test failures that required the archiving, restoration or deletion of a scene as part of the test protocol. As the functionality was missing the tests failed.
After publishing the test report for phase 1, run 1 I realized I’d made a monumental cock-up (technical term) in the tests that were being flagged as untestable due to functionality that wasn’t scehduled for phase 1.
In fact, all the requirements in 02-novel-management and 03-writing-interface are phase 1 requirements. The fact that I had tests failing because functionality hadn’t been implemented, these were genuine failures and not “untestable” tests.
I have now corrected the test report to reflect the change in status of these test and to ensure they’re all included in the run-2 test schedule.
The test run 1 for Novel-It phase 1 has been completed. I’m not going to reproduce the results here, you can read all about then in the test report.
Sufficient to say that we had some fun and games, and made some interesting discoveries about the state of phase 1 and its testing. There are a number of issues raised in GitHub to be fixed or mitigated before the next test run. The work will include adding in the missing phaase 1 feature “World Building Management” as well as a number of patch releases for the fixes.
I have completed the writing-interface test suite, 44 tests, 25 passes and 19 fails.
The result was a bit dissapointing, but the majority of the failures are because the scene archive / restore and delete functionality is missing which means a lot of the tests cannot be run at all, and so count as fails.
The test report is available on the documentation site.
Five days into the testing and both User Management and Novel Management testing has been completed for the first run.
The maajority of tests have passed:
The majority of the failures in the Novel Management section were related to the data fields specified in the requirements not being present on the forms. Also, chapters and scenes are mising their archive and delete functions.
Version v0.3.0 marked the final feature version for phase 1. So what’s next?
Testing it what’s next. Every requirement has a set of tests written using Gherkin syntax. This is a plain text description of the tests that can be automated to run as part of a continuos integration suite. However, there’s a lot of work involved in setting up the steps required for the automation, and so a decision was made to execute the test scripts manually.
A small, feature related, release today that implements FEAT-0303 Lossless navigation.
Previously, if you were writing a scene and clicked on the in-application navigation (breadcrumbs) you got a very ugly browser dialogue asking you to confirm the navigation. This feature introduces a more user friendly confirmation dialogue if you try to leave the writing editor with unsaved changes.
Another small patch to add some properties that were missing from the Novel:
This is a very small patch release to correct any status values in scenes that are not aligned with the current Feature SPecification.
Unless you’ve been using Novel-It prior to v0.2.1 this will have no effect on your application.
Today I’m delighted to announce the release of Novel-It v0.2.0.
This release introduces novel parts as a structural layer within the novel. Now you can create novels with multiple parts, each with multiple chapters and scenes. Parts are optional, not every novel has parts, and you can enable or disable them for each novel on the novel details page.
If you start a novel with parts, and then decide you don’t want them later, you can simply disable them. In this case any exisitng chapters/scenes will be relocated to the novel so you don’t loose anything. Conversely, if you start a novel without parts and enable them later you can assign the existing chapters to the parts when you create or edit them.
Version v0.1.8, released today, fixes a bug with the FEAT-0219 Archive chapter feature where clicking, on the Archive button resulted in an error.
Following the features, requirements and tests for phase 1 I’m pleased to announce that I’ve published the Trace Matrix on the documentation site.
The Trace Matrix provides a cross-reference between the features, requirements and their tests. This ensures that all feaatures have requirements, and all requirements have tests. The table also contains the results of the most recent test run and a link to any issues, should there be any.
As testing proceeds the test IDs will become active links to a test results page for each test case.
Novel-It version v0.1.7 fixes a minor bug on the password reset form where the field labels were not being displayed correctly.
I’m pleased to report that the requirements for all features slated for Novel-It phase 1 have been completed. These include:
You can access the entire requirements set on the Requirements Page.
The requirement documents also contain the test definitions. These are written using a format called Gherkin, a test definition language that is concise and human readable. The tests can be developed further and run automatically using the Python-behave test module. In our case we (I) shall be executing the test steps manually.
The recently completed review and rework of the feature specification has allow me to make an accurate assessment of where there development of phase 1 is.
There are 35 features slated for the phase 1. Of these there are:
Those last 5 are all related to the feature that implements novel parts as a structural layer above chapters. As parts are not used that often in novels (or the ones I read anyway) I had intended to postpone parts until a later phase. However, while reworking the features, I realized how disruptive it would be to implement it later. So it’s going into phase 1.
I’m pleased to report that the work to rewrite the Feature Specification has been completed. The specification now covers all areas of the application in detail, including the all important plotting module. In all there are now 13 feature sections to be implemented across 4 phases.
Now begins the work on the requirement specifications, which will feed into the test specifications. This will quite some time (the feature specification took 9 days) to complete, so I think I will upload the requirements as sections are completed instead of a single big commit.
When I first started working on Novel-It I mapped out the features I want the application to have, and a very sketchy requirements document.
I’ve got to the point now where I have, what I consider, a minimum viable product available in GitHub. It’s no where near all the features I put into the specification. And some of the features that have been implemented deviate somewhat from their feature descriptions.
Novel-It v0.1.6 fixes an issue that carries the obscure title “Vendor all external frontend dependencies”. What on earth does that mean?
When an application, such as Novel-It, is developed it sometimes (often) relies on external code libraries that are pulled foim the Internet everytime the application is run. For example, Novel-It uses external libraries to provide the ability to drag and drop the chapter and scene cards and external libraries are used to provide the fonts used.
I’ve rolled two important fixes into this patch release:
If you created a bulleted (unordered) or numbered (ordered) list in the scene editor then the bullets or numbers did not display when you clicked the Preview button. You still got an indented list, but without the bullets or numbers. This is now resolved.
gunicorn is the command you run to start the application server. In the installation guide the command wad given as:
Slated for the next release is a fix for Issue #29. When you type an unordered list (bullet points) or a numbered list into the editor and click the preview button, the bullets and numbers aren’t displayed.
Go figure.
Anyway, that’s next up.
Novel-It was originally “released” to GitHub as v0.1.0 - a working application but not yet ready for a formal release. As with the way of things, as soon as I’d uploaded it, I started to find a few bugs and there have been a number of patch releases since then. This post summarises those patches. Going forwards there will be individual posts for each Novel-It update.
Novel-It is now publicly available on GitHub. The project is in active pre-v1.0 development and licensed under AGPL-3.0.