Before taking the ICS-414 course, my only experience with software engineering was ICS-314. I remembered some of the concepts, but I had to review quite a bit since I had a semester break between the two classes. In this course project, I learned many new things about developing a web application. The biggest change from 314 to 414 was that our group size was doubled (instead of 4 group members, we had 9). This change gave us more manpower and therefore, faster turnaround time for project issues and ideas. We ended up splitting the team into two parts that focused on different aspects of the application. The first was the front end or design side that would take into account the user experience and the general look and feel of the finished product. The second team was focused on how to implement new collections and how these collections would be accessed. Although our team was split up into two, there was a lot of communication coming from both sides, and we updated each other after any new part was completed. Group meetings were held every two weeks and there was always something to do. Our application made use of the same frameworks and libraries that we used in our 314 project, but the scope of the 414 project required us to use much more features and methods that we didn’t focus on previously.
One aspect of the project that I enjoyed was working on the web scraper for our vehicle collection. I have implemented previous web scrapers before, so I knew which direction to take and what kinds of tools to use. When I first started working on it, I researched different ways to implement it and after trying and failing all of them, I ended up falling back and using the implementation that I knew. However, my failures from web scraping helped me when it came to testing our application. I have never done testing before, but I was very happy when I saw that the testing click-method used CSS selectors. Speaking of testing, that was something that I took on myself and had a fun time doing since it highlighted the lack of id attributes that I use when writing pages and components. For future projects, this knowledge will help me stay organized and make use of all available tools.
Another thing that was very different from 314 was having customer milestones that involved an employer that had zero programming knowledge. Prior to this class, I’ve never been in a worker-employer relationship and didn’t know what kinds of things to expect from the industry. This experience was something very different from other classes because we weren’t following an assignment sheet, instead, we were adapting ideas and feedback over every iteration of our project. Customer milestone meetings were very informative and left us with questions and ideas about how to implement and turn those into reality. We met after every single meeting and made notes about what they wanted and drew out plans on how to get them done. Overall, this class was very rewarding and gave me a lot more experience when it comes to software development. Hopefully, in future projects, I will have the opportunity to use what I learned in this class just like web scraping.