Budget Buddy welcomes you to the fifth blog. This time you will be reading on our team’s collaborative efforts, the challenges encountered during each phase and about the ISEE study course.

TECHNICAL CHALLENGES

• We had limited experience in software development and found it difficult to grasp the concept quickly. Because of this, we had difficulty in implementing such concepts in our software-like Design patterns and Coding conventions for example.
• We also had difficulty in understanding the concepts required for android development and had to work through the project to implement our ideas and requirements to develop a fully functional application.
• Testing the application was challenging as we had no previous experience in testing of the entire software and so the concepts of White and Black box testing.

TEAM WORK

Being a four-member team and dividing multiple activities, from blog and presentation to development and testing, good teamwork played the major role.

Benefits

• Each member had their strengths and it was helpful when the knowledge was shared amongst us .
• ”Out of the box” thinking- Either of us did not get stuck anywhere, as the rest of the team members would jump in and provide their thoughts
• Quick completion of work and doubts clarification happened within team members.
• Various brainstorming sessions have helped us in building the requirements, designing and development.

Challenges

• Communication -We had weekly face to face meeting and a Whatsapp group for discussion and clarifications. Even then at times, there were few misunderstandings of tasks.
• Maintaining the latest code in the repository was difficult, since each of us was working on different parts of the application.
• Sometimes there were issues during the final decision making. As there was no concrete team lead role defined.

ABOUT THE COURSE

The course was very helpful in introducing various concepts related to the field of software engineering. It met our expectations in the following way,

How it met our expectations ?

• Learning the software development essentials like class diagrams, design patterns and principles, use case diagrams and user stories in an interesting way, like Android-development was very helpful.
• This very much improved our coding knowledge, experience and standards.
• Also learnt to develop a complete android application which is a new skill added to our skillset.

Challenge

• The only thing that could have been more helpful was to give the blog questions and slides available at the start of the course. So that it would have helped in implementing the principles thought such as design pattern and design coding conventions as we came to know of such concepts only after we had completed the development.