In the beginning of the semester, each team was tasked to create an application for a customer who were a part of the John. A Burns School of Medicine: Homeless Outreach and Education Project. They were looking for an application that could help them manage inventory of their medications and supplies. My team was UH Cryptics and our application was Zeus, which is a user friendly application where all the main features can be found on one page. Additional information about the functionality of Zeus can be found here.
Performing the data cleaning of the given Excel file was a little bit challenging in the beginning, but eventually we got it through a few iterations. Understanding their terminology was probably the most difficult part starting off and after a few meetings with the customer we resolved those issues. I felt that the bi-weekly zoom meetings were great as it was a check-in for each team on their progress. After the customer saw everyone's progress, they would give us constructive feedback to improve features or even new ones. As a team being able to get a requested feature demoed live, I felt was really rewarding and encouraging to continue working on. To be honest, I was always nervous when presenting for the team because I was worried about forgetting to mention a feature that was in the works.
Overall, I thought this class was a great experience learning more about React alongside with functional components for the first time. If I had to redo my experience with ICS 414, I wish the team size was smaller to around 4-5 members. I believe that too many team members makes it difficult to clearly communicate ideas to everyone. Our team meetings were quite rare as the semester went on. We only met mostly if there was questions about an issue number. I understand it is not always the case that you get to pick your teamsize, but as a personal preference I feel like 4-5 members is a good size. After taking this class (Software Engineering II, ICS 414), I felt like it resparked my interest even more to pursue web development. Working alongside a real-world customer this semester was an unique experience compared to other semesters. I felt like I had more motivation working on this project compared to my other project this semester. In the future, if I did have an opportunity to work further on this project I would probably consider it. I liked working on this project throughout the semester.