Welcome to our final blog. It is great pride, we announce our first public release. Please visit MoneyTracker for more details and download link.
Today, we discuss about our exciting journey throughout the project, a sneakpeak to our experience.
Technical Challenges:
Like all software projects, we faced some difficulties, went through hurdles and road blocks, which though very frustrating at the time, helped us gain experience and shaped our knowledge and skills in software development by significant amount.
Following are some of the major hurdles we faced:
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No prior experience with Java and Android development in general. This caused a great deal of issues, as we started hitting brick walls, but eventually we started looking through the wonderful Android Development documentations while following along some basic java tutorials
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Lack of design and user experience knowledge, which took us through multiple design ideas and phases until we found a design that felt both modern, intuitive yet beautiful. We scoured through existing popular android applications and tried to understand why and how they designed each UI(user interface) and gained insight into modern design practices
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Lack of proper development environment. Android development in general requires modern and fast machines, which as students we lacked. Android studio is very resource heavy reaching memory usage of up to 1.5GB at times while CPU reached maximum load at most of the times since Android Studio provides Intellisense suggestions which require significant resource. Also, running an android emulator takes more or less 1.5GB or RAM in general. So, sometimes we suffered through slow runs.
Team Challenges:
Team work requires a lot of effort and trust. We had a great team, but our team lacked several skills which deterred our initial progress. Also, we had minor team reorganization which affected our performance.
Some team related challenges we faced:
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Lack of technical knowledge in general was a large road block as none of our team members had previous experience in this regard, hence it was very difficult to decide who will handle development in general as learning new technical skills require some dedication and significant time contribution which none of us had the luxury of
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Lack of time, caused us some problems as everyone had their own schedules and common issue was that, no one was free on any convenient time, so we failed to meet up frequently or discuss our progress
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Lack of regular meetings caused disjoint progress as some members failed to learn their responsibilities for next sprint and others had to cover the lack in short notice, which caused team conflicts and deterred our progress further
Despite all the problems, we made a great team and combined our effort to see through the project to a successful ending.
Benefits:
Working as a team had several benefits for our project. Working in a team in general is the fundamental step in all software development project. A team is a combination of like minded people working towards a same goal while helping each other on the way.
We enjoyed several benefits working on the team, some interesting ones were:
- Distribution of work among members
- Constant support and motivation from each other
- Sharing of knowledge among team
- Clarification of technical and non-technical issues
- Keeping development in correct direction
- Keeping tab on overall progress
Working in a team helped us greatly and without the team effort we could not complete the project. The most important take away from working on our team was how to efficiently manage everything in a team to reach a common goal.
About the Course:
The course Introduction to Software Engineering for Engineers is an excellent attempt at introducing students to fundamentals of Software Engineering in general. The course included a project to give hands on experience on how a project is managed and run in the software development industry, which is a great asset for us as students.
The project topic set the course apart from other technical courses, because while, other courses put students to pursuing abstract and theory based projects which has no direct or clear connection to the real world, this course introduced us to a concrete real world problem giving us valuable insight and experience into the world of software development, helping us gain skills such as sales pitch and progress report(presentations), interaction with customer and understanding their needs(meetings) as well as development task in a completely new environment(android) giving us a major experience on grasping and understanding the required fundamentals into latest or modern technology without losing time and effort into learning irrelevant task, the important skills a software engineer must posses to keep up with fast changing landscape of software engineering.
Overall, the course was very well organized and extremely helpful for students without prior knowledge of Software Engineering, and in our opinion it succeeded reaching its goal.
Intoduction of Our Application:
Money Tracker App is a simple android app & easy to use. It is designed with User-friendly User interface. Our app is capable of recording daily income and expenses and any related feature entailed. We can manage the transactions in different categories & can calculate the expenses. Our App is secured by a PIN, which is private and can’t be assessed by other persons. The Transactions are easily identified with icons which are unique to identify.
Money Tracker App is very helpful for the users who used to manage their transactions in a book or somewhere else. It is very simple to use. Our App has different categories to maintain the transactions & payment methods which we usually use. In our app, you are free to add Category or payment method too. Another advantage, you can add short notes for the transaction if you needed. Frequently,you can track your transactions by using “Filter” in our app.
Some Features:
Following are some of the major features of MoneyTracker.
- Pin Lock to secure your data
- All your recent transactions at your fingertip
- Edit/Delete old transactions
- Many Category and Payment Types, or define your own
- Montly overview of all youur transactions
- Intuitive and Beautiful interface
- Free! no ads, no hidden costs
App Meta Information
- Android Version: 5.1.x(Lollipop and up)
- Category: Finance
- File size: 1.50 MB
- Age Limit: 6+ years
Useful Links:
You can find more details and download the latest version here
THANKS FOR VISITING