What communication tools is your team using, and how well is this going?

Our team primarily uses Microsoft Teams to communicate about the project. During the project setup we had used it for video conferencing, but recently we have chosen to communicate through messaging primarily. I have liked using Teams, however, it is difficult to keep track of messages when there are many going through the channel in the span of one day. I found it helpful to create two channels, one for daily updates about what we are working on and the other as a general chat. The first channel ensures that we limit merge conflicts and working on the same items, to avoid doing the same work twice. The later is a good space for questions that arise and brainstorming how to go about fixing issues that come up.

Do you feel your project is on-track to succeed? If not, what do you plan to do to help the team get back on track?

I’m very proud of how far we’ve come with the project thus far. I have been fortunate to have few days where I am stuck, despite mobile development being new to me. However, I would also want to point out that our team has spent a lot more time than the estimated ten a week by the course. I believe the hardest part will be figuring out how to deploy and creating an application that works cross-platform, as there are many regulations in terms of Apple and Android specifics with some of the features we are trying to implement such as authorization and push notifications.

How often does your team commit their code? Is code integrating easily?

For the most part we have had a high success rate when it comes to integrating our code. This is because we communicate to each other before starting a task to avoid working on the same files in the code base as much as possible. When there are merging conflicts, they tend to be relatively simple to resolve. I believe I have ran into this issue the most as I push larger PRs than my team members. At this point in the project I am hoping to soon take the time to refactor the code as we are using React and it is easy to avoid repetitive chunks of code if we implement more robust components.

A handful of recent screenshots of the UI – including the Bike Search page (with both a map and list view) as well as the Bike Checkout page (reached by clicking on a bike in the list).