Building Breakout: What We Built

Why This Matters

Most design approaches promise to reduce complexity. Few put that claim under measurement. Over six sessions of the Building Breakout course, we built a complete game using Combinant® course materials, code examples, tests, and software-development metrics.

This session shows what happened. Not theory. Not benchmarks. The actual product, the actual code, and the actual numbers. We review the design decisions, the implementation history, and the metrics collected during the course.

What We'll Do

We walk through the product we built. We open the codebase and review its structure. We show the metrics dashboard: implementation effort, cost-of-change metrics, software-development data, and changes across the course.

Then we review what the data shows, which design decisions mattered, and what the course results suggest for future applications.

Who This Is For

You write software for a living. You want to see real metrics from a real project — not promises, not philosophy. You don't need to have attended the course or the first workshop. This session stands on its own.

Why Attend

You will see a complete codebase, the metrics collected during the course, and the design decisions that shaped the results. You will see what worked, what did not, what surprised us, and what the data makes visible.

Where This Workshop Fits

This is the closing workshop of Building Breakout — the first product in the Cost-of-Change Challenge. Three products, three different domains — all studied through Combinant® course materials, code examples, tests, and metrics to compare design decisions and cost-of-change behavior.

• The Breakout Game: Different Ways to Design It — Three approaches compared.
• Building Breakout Course — Six sessions. The game was built.
• Building Breakout: What We Built — You are here

Next in the Challenge: → Building MiniVi → Building Trading Alerts

Prerequisites: None. Open to everyone.

Workshop Outline

Free online workshop

Duration: 3.5 hours

The Products

What we built, how the game works, and what the codebase contains.

The Numbers

Implementation effort, cost-of-change metrics, software-development data, and changes across the course.

The Code

How the codebase is structured. How design decisions affected complexity, maintainability, and cost-of-change metrics.

The Design Decisions

What shaped the results. What worked, what did not, and what surprised us.

Future Examples

What the Building Breakout results suggest for future Combinant® courses and reference products.

Q&A with Cohort Participants

Their experience, their observations, and what held up in practice.

The Instructor

Francesco Cirillo. Creator of the Pomodoro® Technique. Senior software designer, Extreme Programming pioneer. Decades of software design led to one question: how do software teams make cost-of-change considerations visible and measurable?