Our Reflection
This project has benefited all of our group members in various aspects of programming. We have learned designing an app from scratch with all of the procedures such as brain-storming for ideas, designing the user interface, designing the classes. Since our app requires a database, we have learned a lot about the databases and ways of implementing them in code. Github was very essential for our project, hence we learned how to use github, pushing code, etc. There were complex algorithms needed for some of our methods which made us think and find an effective way of creating those algorithms. Moving with the team, being in touch has been like a real work environment and work experience which was extremely beneficial. Overall, this project has benefited all of us and made us much more experienced.
Of course there were things which were disliked about the project work such as time problems and code incompatibility. We have promised a lot for our project without knowing exactly how long it will take to implement our promises. Therefore, some aspects of the app took longer than we expected which caused some time issues regarding our other assignments. Code incompatibility was another issue. Some of the codes written by different group members were not fitting each other which required extra time and effort to make codes fit. But in the end, these 2 are common problems and good experiences for our future projects and career.
There were several difficult aspects of the app that our group members faced and challenged by. For example, XML was changing and creating problems when we run the app on different devices. Doing the “Achievements” property of our app required a lot of effort and debugging as well as creating effective algorithms. Also there were difficulties with creating the correct / accurate algorithm for filtering the data from the database according to the user’s choice. Moreover, there were difficulties in terms of developing complex algorithms in general due to our limited knowledge of developing complex algorithms. Android Studio was also creating technical issues.
If we would do this project again, we would promise less in the first place. Because certain properties of the app were not very basic and consumed a lot of time which caused some time problems. Those properties could be promised for the future. Another thing we would do is being more precise in terms of organization since it can save us lots of times and workload.
We estimate that our group spent over 400 hours in total. We are sure that it is not less than 400 hours.
We are extremely proud of what we have achieved. We were not sure whether we could do everything we promised in the first place. However, we have done everything we have promised. Now, we believe in ourselves more than before and we are really proud and happy about it.