I am glad that I decided to take the Software Engineering II course taught by Professor Carleton (Cam) Moore this semester. In my Software Engineering I class, I was introduced to Meteor, Semantic UI, and Agile Project Management. Being able to apply all these skills to a project with a real-world client was very exciting and eye-opening. Our client was nice, understanding and challenged us with their requests. After working in an even larger group, I learned that IDPM project management is extremely important. Setting up issues before a milestone is beneficial so we don’t scramble to find things to do. It also helps with outlining a clear goal so that we can implement the functions required.
There are many differences between the Software Engineering I (ICS 314) course and the Software Engineering II (ICS 414) course. For ICS 414, we were given roughly 4 months to recreate a website per a client’s requests. The ICS 314 project was in a time frame of a little over a month. This project had more requirements and much more complexities because we needed to incorporate multiple suer types and thus more collections to connect. My 314 project only had 2 collections which only overlapped a little. This course also had me working in a larger group; ICS 314 was a group of 3 and ICS 414 was a group of 6. Working in a larger group was more difficult for me because everyone had their own naming conventions and sometimes code wasn’t necessarily intuitive for me. For both classes, I thought there was a couple of issues with communication but overall, the project went well. As I continue to work on more group projects, I realize the importance of constant communication.
For this course, I was in a team was called Aloha Time and we tried our best to produce a working website for our real-world client Volunteer Ally. After working on this project for the whole semester, we deployed our product and it can be found here. This project was fun because as the client saw our websites develop, they would come up with new implementations that would make the website more efficient. My group members implemented a lot of functionality for the volunteer and admin roles. Volunteers are able to make an account, browse and bookmark opportunities, learn about organizations, and upload images. Admins have the power to remove volunteers and organizations as well as verify opportunities before they are posted on the Browse Opportunities page. Other fun implementations in our final product is the map and the filtering system. The map will show volunteers where opportunities will take place and they can even click on the marker to open a new tab for the exact address. The filtering system would allow volunteers to find opportunities with specific attributes like E Although I found working in a larger group more difficult, being able to see what others can accomplish made me inspired. One thing I wish we could’ve done was have weekly meetings to go over issues that were finished and issues that needed to be completed. In any future projects, I think I will push to make this a high priority. I’ve learned from the ICS 314 and ICS 414 project that talking it out with group members lowers my stress and gives me a better idea on how to tackle problems.
If you would like to read more about my contributions and reflection about my experience working on the Aloha Time project, click here.