My adventure of being a student in Software Engineering II after taking Software Engineering I back in Spring 2020, which was more than a year ago, allowed me the ability to continue enhancing my software development skills and work for others in the community. Upon registering for this class, I assumed that it’ll just be a continuation of ICS 314 and will of course be much more challenging. Fortunately, concepts in ICS 414 were pretty much the same, where we got to work with the IDE, Intellij IDEA, and Github as well. But as mentioned previously, the last time I took a software engineering class and programmed in JavaScript was more than a year ago, so I would say I was rusty of how it all worked again. After at least a week into the class, I was able to make sense of what to do when it came to our project!
Our team project for this semester was for the Homeless Outreach and Medical Education (HOME). In this HOME project for mobile clinics all over the island of Oahu, we had to create an inventory application for their medications, supplies, dispense feature for patients, vaccines, etc. This gave me the experience of working for others in the health community and having an application that may be utilized for efficiency in their work. This also has given me more perspectives of what computer science can do; We computer scientists/software developers, have the opportunities to work for others in a variety of fields and departments. Working along with health professionals and students has shown me the capabilities of what we can do for the better well-being of the community.
The team project of the semester was interesting to work on and my team was able to implement features that our customers asked for. Working with my team has shown me both my strengths and weaknesses. One of the strengths that I had in this project was creativity. For instance, in milestone 1, we had to create mock-up pages for our application. I made the mock-up page for editing the inventory. As this had no functionality, it was fun to use divergent thinking of what it would and could look like. Then in milestone 2, we had to implement functionality, so we were able to implement some of the pages to actual working code. My weaknesses, on the other hand, were communication and time management. In terms of communication, we used discord. This made communication a lot easier, but on my part, I rarely communicated my troubles when it came to my part of the project. There were many times throughout the semester that I had difficulty in my JavaScript skills, and rarely asked for help. I realized that I should’ve in order to make the project a lot easier for me, but despite that, I was able to complete what I needed to do! There were times, of course, where I managed to communicate with my teammates such as what we can do to make our project better, have it stand out, and what else was left to implement. In terms of time management, I would say that after milestone 3 it started to feel slow till the last milestone of the semester. I tend to do my part of the project nearing the end of the milestone. But at the same time, this class has definitely strengthened my time management such as managing my work for other classes alongside this class in a timely manner as well.
To conclude, my semester adventure in ICS 414 was an enlightening experience to work with customers in the health field, and being able to demonstrate my capabilities of working with other developers and enhancing my programming skills. I certainly recommend ICS 414 to ICS students as it gives them the opportunity to create an application outside the ICS department, and analyze their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to software development and working as a team.