Thursday, November 10, 2022

CS103 - Assessment 2 - Week 3

 This blog post will talk over the final week of our group project.

As my team and I near completion of this project we are communicating daily and working incredibly hard to fix any bugs and create the best environment for the user we possibly can. We conducted testing on various anonymous users and took their feedback with careful consideration and used it to our advantage. This gave us a good insight on what real users would experience and feel while using our program. Once this feedback had been collected my team and I held stand up meetings via discord to discuss the feedback and implementations that could be made to better enhance the UX of our program. This was also our chance to fix any bugs that arose or small design changes/grammatical errors that could be fixed. 

This was an incredible learning experience for me, I learnt responsibility and discipline by contributing to our daily meetings. I learnt how to work in a team and how to receive feedback and turn that into new ideas. I felt this assessment was a good example of what a real life project would feel like, from being apart of a development team, to considering client requirements and requests, to testing on real people. I grew my communication skills as well as making new friends along the way.

Some challenges we faced were fixing some final bugs as well as collecting people to test our program as the compiler in needed to run it. The compiler can be quite confusing to download for people with lesser IT experience so we were limited to people with decent IT knowledge/already have IDE's compatible with C++ or in person friends or family to test the program on our own PC's. We overcame this struggle however and managed to get good feedback and use it to make our program more user friendly.

Also during this week we prepared ourselves for our presentation. We decided to divide the presentation into 3 sections so everyone had a chance to speak and present our final product. I went first talking about the clients requirements as well as some other talking points to support our final product, Ann went second demonstrating the final program and Matt went into further detail about our complex loops, struggles we faced and how we overcame them. We all rehearsed in our own time and scheduled a time in one of our stand ups to present. 

Overall this assignment has been an incredible experience both for learning about programming and getting a taste of what life of a developer is like! 

Thursday, November 3, 2022

CS103 - Assessment 2, Week 2

 

In this week’s blog, I will share the progress of our project.

Due to the advanced technology of communication, we tend to forget our working hours every day. We either did not have a plan for the day or we have done too much in a day. I (Ann), come out with a plan for the team to start a daily stand-up. The initial plan is to update our daily progress and plan our tasks for the day.

After having daily stand-up for three days, I found out we progressed tremendously faster and were able to see what our plans are ahead, the ticket in Trello is moving from left to right each day, which is great progress from my point of view. Besides that, having stand-up gives us better communication to head start our day. We can voice out our problems and support each other not only about assessment but also about personal issues.

Besides that, we have come out with a UML diagram that gives us a great structure between the developer and business side. Both sides have a clearer picture of how the apps are going to be. Any changes and adjustments can be easily discussed from the diagram.

The only challenge this week is to collaborate with each other using GitHub. I (Ann) found out that the other teammates (Matthew and Keshia) are using different IDE with me to complete the CPP file. A lot of issues happen between IDE and GitHub. Finally, I figure out a method to solve this problem. We shall submit a pull request or make changes from GitHub. Additionally, I will upload a README.txt file to introduce our CPP file. 

Overall, this week’s daily stand-up gives us a huge improvement in our team.  We will continue to use this method for our assessment.


 Written by Ann Lee