Coming into this semester, I didn’t know what to expect from this course other than the fact that it is a semester long project for a real group of people. Our class was given an opportunity to work with the Department of Education in creating an application for tracking bills throughout the legislative system. Their current software is quite old and is hard to use due to it being so archaeic. The goal of our new application was to be able to keep the same features that the DOE already has as well as building on top of it. These features could have been a UI overhaul, a difference comparison, email function, etc.
Unlike ICS 314, the group sizes are much bigger. A group had around eight to ten people and it was a good experience working with a bigger group. Our group called ourselves a-doe-bo as a play on of the words adobo and the DOE. Our application name for the project was not very creative as we simply named it DOE Bill Tracker. None of us really got very creative with the name as we went diving straight into making the application. The group had members with mixed skill levels, with some people taking ICS 314 the semester prior and some people having taken ICS 314 a couple years ago. Some of us had to learn Bootstrap and get back into the flow of things but it was very easy to get back into it with the help of our teammates.
Our DOE Bill Tracker, as with everyone else’s application, starts off with the Meteor Application template. In order to really flesh out how to design this application, our class initially met with the customer in order to figure out what they wanted to see. From what they told us, we decided to have a basic UI and really focus on what features they wanted. Initially, we had the general flow of how the bill passes through, but we added many more additional features such as an emailer and a filter. We created mockups of the pages we wanted in the beginning and from there, tried to design it like those drawn mockups. I mainly worked on the collections and wiring up data to each component and page. I learned a great deal in working with bootstrap in conjunction into what I already knew. We struggled a lot in figuring out a few things such as our PDF uploader and how we were going to be able to see and download those files. In the end, we got most of what we wanted done but whatever we couldn’t finish nearing the final meeting with the customer, was scrapped. Despite the features and sections we scrapped, I feel like our end product matches with what the DOE wanted pretty well. The workflow within the application was very smooth and the extra features such as the filter and emailer worked very well. The overall experience with working with a group on this project was invaluable as it taught me many different things when working with a team and a customer.