ICS 414 Reflection
01 May 2023Incredible Journey
ICS 414 was the first in-person group project course I had since the pandemic and I felt it was an incredible experience. The reasons are my fellow group members, the tremendous support from Professor Moore, and clients who had well-defined minimum and desirable requirements for the project.
Group
I was in team T3 and each of us brought many different experiences and talents that contributed to a successful project. Frequent communication helped keep us on track and we accomplished this by meeting twice a week on Discord plus in-class meetings. At each group meeting, we shared which issues we were working on to keep everyone apprised, to get help if we were struck, and to avoid duplicate work. The in-class meetings helped us to bond together as a group and I believe this was as important as the technical technical skills we learned. In addition, I was impressed with how each of us quickly addressed the issue of a member who was not doing any work. We contacted the individual to provide them with an opportunity to step up, and when we did not see any contributions, we moved forward as a team of six.
Professor Moore
The ICS 414 professor provided a production template to use as a baseline for the project. The production template was mostly the same as the ICS 314 template with one important difference, the inclusion of MATP Collection.js. This file resulted in much frustration as we dedicated many hours trying to troubleshoot why collections were not loading properly. My team members echoed the same frustrations and we were successful in resolving the issue with each others help and the guidance from Professor Moore. I appreciated how responsive Professor Moore was when we needed any assistance. He would take the time to explain the concepts or review code to help us overcome our challenges. Additionally, the updated course website contained video modules that I could refer back to when I go stuck.
Clients
Lastly, as Professor Moore mentioned, having clients who can clearly articulate their needs and wants is invaluable. In my professional career, I worked with clients who expressed conflicting needs or constantly changed their minds after development, which led to delays and scope and feature creep. The frequent class and customer milestone presentations provided the group with constructive feedback and kept us on track. The open communication between the client and the group helped to clarify any confusions so we could develop what was requested. I think at the last customer presentation all the needs that the client expressed were included in the final product.
Last Words
I thoroughly enjoyed this journey, added more technical skills to my toolbelt and more importantly met new friends. My one recommendation is that students have some familiarity with basic database knowledge such as normalization, primary and foreign keys. My group built collections that were not normalized and needed to be restructured in the middle of the project as we developed and added more functionalities to the system