My Experience in ICS 414's UH Cryptics
14 Dec 2021During the Fall 2021 semester, I took ICS 414 Software Engineering II class. I was extremely interested in taking this class for quite some time now because I really enjoyed ICS 314 Software Engineering I. In this class, we were tasked with coming up with a web application for a real-world customer which I thought was very interesting. Usually when I work on projects for classes we usually don’t have any customer for our apps, we are just working on them for our grades. With this app I had more motivation to make sure it looked good and had a good user experience. I was put into the group that we named UH Cryptics.
My Team’s App
I go into quite detail about the app that my group and I made here. The overall gist of our app is that the customer we were making it for was John A. Burns School of Medicine: Houseless Outreach and Education Project. Which is a mobile patient care unit for people who cannot go to the doctors. They were having difficulty keeping track of their inventory of medications and supplies. They were using a Google Form to try and keep some sort of record while dispensing medications, but they had many issues. Our application Zeus provided a clean and simple interface that allows them to add medications and supplies to the inventory, edit them after it’s entered into the system, and dispense them that makes sure to subtract the amount being dispensed from what is in the inventory automatically so the information is always up to date.
My Overall Experience of this class
I thought this class was great, I got to use a lot of React which I don’t use that often. The last time I used it was for ICS 314 Software Engineering I, but this time around I really enjoyed using React. This semester I used functional components which I think are so much better than class based components, everything is so much simpler and easier to use. I think I’ll be using React a lot more for my own personal projects in the future. Working with my group was probably the most challenging part of this class, I think there was a bit too much students per group. It’s a bit hard to have enough things to have all 8 students to do. The app was mostly worked on between a few of us and the rest were mostly non-existant. Communication was really lackluster between our group there was one group member that I have never heard speak or have seen them type anything to us, it was quite strange. I think if I could re-do this class, I would reduce the size of teams to maybe 4 or 5 and communicate with my team a lot more so we can all be on the same page.