Project!
This week I received my group project topic and group members. My project topic is the Crowd-Sourced Shopping App. This project was my 2nd pick, so I am quite excited to be working on this one. I took the CS 492 Mobile Development course last quarter (Summer 2021) and was quite surprised with how much I enjoyed programming user interfaces and writing programs in Dart. My learnings from CS 492 will certainly come in handy for this project.
My initial thoughts were that this project will be exclusively a mobile app on both Android and iOS systems. Using Dart as the project language would make this quite easy to accomplish. A mobile application specifically would also make it convenient for users to scan bar codes to input products from each store.
The biggest hurdle I identified for this app would be the implementation of app’s ability to scan barcodes to input items. This functionality seems quite complicated, but I believe my solution here would be to identify an API that could help automate this process of scanning barcodes and uploading items to the application.
Overall, the Crowd-Sourced Shopping app is appealing to me and has the capacity to challenge the programming and designing abilities of my group.
Group!
This week was also my first time meeting my group members, Ryan and Mihai, via Discord call. We made our first call to introduce ourselves to one another and to work collaboratively on the Team Standard assignment.
From the introductions, we all found common ground in our current positions. We are all on our last quarter in OSU’s program and all of us are interested in looking for full-time software developer positions after graduation. We have all also taken CS 492, so we are all at least have working knowledge in Dart/Flutter. This is quite fortunate for us as a group because we can hit the ground running, at least when it comes to programming the front-end of the app.
As for the Team Standard document, we each individually added some of our own ideas/standards to the documents prior to the meeting to help save on time. During the meeting, we discussed each standard and ensured that we came to a unanimous agreement on each standard.
We generally agreed on all the standards that were added and removed a few that we decided were not necessary. The biggest standard for me, was to establish communication as a group. We reached consensus on at minimum, a weekly “Sprint Planning” meeting to decide as a group what our goals were for the upcoming week. We would use the weekly Stand Up discussion assignment as our actual stand up weekly to address roadblocks or provide updates on progress.
The meeting felt productive and talking to my teammates gave me “good vibes”. Both of them seemed excited and happy to work on the project we were assigned. You can’t ask for much else from your teammates when it comes to school project groups.
