My team has finally made it to the exciting stage of actually starting out project! We finally have our repository and our development environment setup. The repository will be public and viewable throughout the iterations of the project at: https://github.com/AlexGrasley/transfer.me. This is an exciting stage of the development process. My mind is fresh, I haven’t run into any difficult issues to solve, and I’m eager to get started on the project! I always try to appreciate this time because it is not yet tainted by the frustration of the inevitable issues we will run into along the way😊. I don’t mean to sound jaded, since a lot of the joy I get out of software development comes from overcoming those issues, but they can also be frustrating at times.
While we have the repository and development environment setup, there is still some work to do before we actually get to work on building the first real version of our app. As a team, we have done well on working through the writing assignments during the course that are designed to help us plan. We divided some of the components of the project into 3 main topics: 1. Cryptography 2. Database 3. Front end & Back end You could argue that front end and back end deserve their own “number” since they will be such large components of the project, but we figure we will continue planning as we go.
I think that planning out a software project, especially when new to a certain framework or language, can be more easily done in an iterative manner. Since none of us have a plethora of experience developing in C# or. NET, the planning for the front back end will have to be done as we learn more about the project. To put it in different terms, a car mechanic wouldn’t want to plan how he would perform maintenance on an engine, if he doesn’t even know how to do something simple like change the oil. The Plan
The Plan
The first thing I hope we can accomplish as a team is to build some wireframes. Wireframes are diagrams that outline how a project should work to the user. Building Wireframes is something I did in CS352 (Usability in Engineering), while it was obnoxious at first and seemed a little redundant, as we created and analyzed the wireframes, we did have significant improvements on the UIs we were building.
We may also want to generate some User Stories. I can see the potential for the usefulness of user stories, as I did it in CS361 (Software Engineering), but the scale of the project we made user stories for was so small that I couldn’t see the value. I’m hopeful we can at least try creating some user stories to see if they are beneficial to us.
Trello
The next thing we want to do before development, but after we do some user interface design, is to build up our Trello board. It’s best for us to do this after we have done some additional planning so we have a better idea of what the front end will look like, and in turn, how the back end will behave. I feel confident in my ability to create and organize different Trello cards and assign it to some team members since this is something I have done for the past 6 months or so at work, and also had experience doing in CS362. I think once we have a solid list of specific, well defined tasks, we will be ready to start development.
I’m looking forward to utilizing Github as a team, combined with project management software like Trello, and communication software like Teams, to collaborate as a group. I’m looking forward to Stand up meetings, Code reviews, Sprint planning, and Sprint reviews. These are all popular buzzwords I’ve heard in the software industry, but never actually got a chance to take part in myself!
