I think every developer had probably experienced the panic and confusion of coming back to an old codebase and wondering what crazed past version of themselves wrote the hieroglyphics before them. Sometimes it’s a miserable experience wading through the cryptic puzzles, but more often then not a few minutes (or a few dozen) can be enough to figure out what was going through the past self’s mind. But as working with a team on the Capstone project (and previously in Databases and Software Engineering I & II) has shown, coordinating properly with other people is has its own challenges and rewards.
Thankfully, there haven’t been any major issues this quarter and the problems there are usually amount to small bugs or minor changes here and there. And because of the great early work of a teammate to set up GitHub workflows/actions and ensuring we agreed upon a review process, we’ve certainly avoided larger problems that could have occurred had we not been more careful.
But despite safeguards, I’m learning that some things you just cant take for granted, especially when it comes to a web application. For example, one of my teammates is spearheading the backend development while I’m focusing on the frontend. When it comes time for integrating certain features like CRUD operations, it becomes immediately obvious when we weren’t on the same page with describing variable names, field names for the JSON object, or route naming conventions. Again, most of the time these things are trivial and easily corrected or adjusted for.
It has been a great learning experience to discuss and agree upon common naming conventions and other things that will need to be shared between our parts of the project. Taking time to plan, coming up with documentation and charts can help, and just making sure we’re on the same page and discuss any assumptions during our standup meetings. As my final quarter at OSU is drawing to a close, I’m glad to have learned the lessons I have from this and other classes and been able to do so alongside wonderful, helpful, and smarter-than-me classmates who’ve helped me along the way.
