ICS 414: Software Engineering II gives the Computer Science students at UH Manoa a second opportunity to implement from scratch a Web application using React and Meteor. For the 2022 fall semester the students enrolled in ICS 414 were gathered into teams and given a single assignment, which was to implement Legislative Bill Tracker for the Hawaii Department of Education.
Currently the Hawaii Department of Education employees tracks, creates, reviews, approves/disapproves testimony for Legislative Bills pertaining to their sect of the government using a very convoluted system involving scraped data from the Hawaiil.gov which is fed into an old piece of software from the 90’s. Bottom line is, just like a lot of departments in the state of Hawaii, they need new software. Lucky for the students in ICS 414, the state can’t afford to pay professionals to implement new web applications for their departments, thus we(ICS students) get a chance to create this software for them.
The team I was on named the project Alahele, which means in hawaii Olelo to track or to trail. I picked this name because it seems that not only do many famous software companies use names from the Hawaii Olelo(wiki, akamai, etc…), we are in Hawaii making software for the State of Hawaii, therefore we should be using Hawaiian names.
I knew from the beginning that successfully implementing a usable product for the HDOE, in 16 weeks, with a team of students, was gonna take full time work. Something that a 17 credit student + part time job person does not have time for. Yes I set my standards kind of low, but I set other goals, the last time I used React, I had very little experience as a programmer. Three years later and three years of working a Job for ITS using angular. I felt I could really get to the bottom of which framework I prefer (React of Angular.)
As far as the team goes, everyone was wonderful, we all worked together, we used Discord to communicate, and helped each other. Nobody ever fought or did anything disrespectful the entire time. Given more time I believe we could have come together and produced a great final product.
The main problem in my opinion which held this project back(from becoming a final usable product in 16 weeks) was the intricacy of the clients work-flow that the app was supposed to encapsulate. Here we have a highly complex workflow from pulling the correct Bills from the legislator, tagging these bills progress, stages and assigning them to the correct offices, and creating a way for HDOE employees to share this with each other within the APP. This was a lot to understand at first, and the fact that we(the teams) began to write code before we had a solid understanding of what tasks and features the HDOE software needed, is a problem. I feel it’s an amateur move to start writing code before you understand what the code is supposed to do, and/or before you have the means to access the data that the software is supposed to present to the client. But I do understand that in the development industry a lot of projects ran this way, so believe that this class gave us some very useful real-life knowledge.