A Glimpse of Real Software Development
11 Dec 2022Overview
Through this semester, I was able to see how real software development works. As soon as the class started, team members for each team were assigned randomly, and we met real clients who wanted us to make the application as they wanted. It was a situation that I had never experienced before, so it was intriguing on the one hand and nervous on the other. It was because I had never developed software for a real client and was assigned a team with random people without knowing it. Our client was DOE, who needed the application to track bills from the legislator. The concept of tracking bills was confusing at moment, but our teammates worked on understanding the concept of tracking bills and focused on how to implement this complicated application.
Project Management
Our team was able to focus on creating applications using GitHub. There were a total of 7 people on our team, but we were in charge of different tasks. Therefore, we used the project board to see who is doing what kind of task at that moment and were able to create the application by merging our branches into the main branch. This feature of GitHub was the most helpful for us to work as a team, but I felt that there was a lack of communication between the team members. We mostly used discord to discuss the project but it had a big limitation. Therefore, I believe we did not get much done at the end of the project. However, this experience was something that could be happened in the real job, so I believe it was another opportunity that I got to think about how to supplement it well for my future career.
Throughout the Project
As I said before, the concept of this application itself was difficult for me to understand. Therefore, I worked on the project with the work I could do as much as I could. We created an application with Javascript, Meteor, bootstrap 5, MongoDB, and CSS. Among the functions I made, the most memorable implementations are the search bar, pagination, and the ability to save the bill selected by the user. The reason why these three are the most memorable is because it took me a lot of time to implement it. Rather than simply applying a texture on the website, it was necessary to create a new MongoDB collection and use Javascript commands to actually make it work. It was very thrilling when I managed to apply it to our website after several attempts.
Overall
I feel taking ICS414 was especially beneficial to me than any other class. It was very valuable to meet the real client and make the application that they wanted. Also, it was a very precious experience for me to have team members assigned randomly like the actual job, and to have worked on a project with them for several weeks. Through ICS414, I was able to see how I could develop myself further for working as a team and understanding the needs of the clients. I can defiantly say that I gained a lot of experience during this semester of developing a software and glimpse of how a real career field works.