ICS 414 is a project-oriented course that further develops Software Engineering skills learned in ICS 314. The course does not have any exams or quizzes. Instead, students will learn how to build a Web-Application for an actual customer. The course teaches how to communicate with group members and customers and offer a solution to a customer's problem.
This semester, we had to develop a web application for a Non-Profit Organization, Volunteer Ally. Their organization connects volunteers to Non-Profit Organizations like American Red Cross and others. Users can sign up as volunteers in their web application and browse to sign up for volunteering opportunities. They have tasked us to implement a way to recreate their web application and add a new feature to track hours and display them.
It was an interesting project as their web application included implementing a Map, Filtering Data, and Tracking Users. During the beginning of the project, Milestone 1, my group and I mostly created mock-up pages to preview what think the web application should look like. I think we could've done a better job implementing the mock-ups as they did not show any improvements from their web application.
Milestone 2 mostly consists of building how the data should be stored. Personally, I liked doing this part as it helped me understand how to query data and build a database. Although I feel like we did a really great job in creating the database, I think it could be tweaked even more so that the speed of rendering data can be faster. We use the remaining Milestone 3, 4, 5, and 6 to render data in the pages, fix bugs, and implement the track hours functionality that the customer wanted. My group did a good job with the implementation, but I don't think it was the best work we could submit as we did not implement some of the pages they had. Overall, I've enjoyed what the course offered: developing skills to create a web application. It also developed my problem-solving skills and taught me to think outside the box.