Continuing my Journey in Software Engineering
07 May 2025Continuing my Journey Software Engineering
Continuing Down the Path
The course, ICS 414, is the continuation of ICS 314. In this class, students like myself take our software engineering skills to another level by using those skills to create an application for an actual client. I was assigned to a group that originally started out with 8 people, but then became a group of 6 down the line. Taking what we had learned from this class, we worked together and collaborated to create our version of a financial model that serves almost the same purpose as an Excel sheet, but as a website application.
Working on our Semester Long Project
As mentioned above, our project was meant to an application used for financial purposes and was served to be like a better version of Excel. Unlike ICS 314, our project for the course lasted the entire semester rather than only a few months. Not only that, but the size of our group was definitely a lot bigger than what we had in ICS 314. This meant trying to figure out tasks to come up with so everyone had something to do.
The first thing my group and I did was figure out our group name. Based on another person who joined our group accidently, we were inspired by his story and named ourselves “Pineapple Spire”. This name came from the company/client we were working with, Spire, and from our temporary groupmate’s story. Although I don’t remember the exact details, my other groupmates and I thought his story was hilarious and were inspired. Even though this person left shortly to his original group after we settled on “Pineapple Spire”, we agreed that we’d keep the name just because we didn’t know what else to name ourselves, and because we still thought it’d be funny and inspiring to name ourselves this.
Next came the long journey of creating our application. In the very beginning, like a lot of other groups in our class, we started off with the front-end part of our app. The data we had on our project was hardcoded at the moment. We did this because we just wanted to be able to get our vision of our application out there. Slowly over time, we started working on the back-end stuff, such as creating our database. Eventually, this meant that our hardcoded data was no longer hardcoded and was actually in the database and what not. Something big we implemented towards the middle of the semester were graphs, which were asked of by our client. This was something they asked for all the groups to do. Not only did we have a separate with just graphs only, but each of our stress test pages also had graphs so users and clients could see the financial data of those stress test in the form of a graph. As we got near the end of the semester, we made some last revisions and clean ups to our application to make it look a little cleaner, as well as incorporate feedback and critiques we had received from the milestones we had throughout the semester.
Reflecting on the Journey
Thinking back on this experience, I’d say it was interesting because this is one of the first big projects I’ve worked on, especially with a group. It was also interesting because I think it’ll help me prepare for what to possibly expect in the real world. My experience in the ICS 414 course allowed me to practice what I’ve learned in ICS 314 and improve on those skills. It has also helped me improve on working in a group of people and with agile project management. Agile project management is something we learned in ICS 314, which is when we split our project into smaller tasks. This was something that helped me with this project by giving my group mates and myself smaller tasks that will improve our application. Taking this course was a great experience and really contributed to my education in computer science.