Throughout my four years at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, I never truly experienced large-scale software development. ICS 314 was the closest I’ve ever gotten to a true experience, and moving on from that class made me crave more. Now two years later ICS 414 gave me an experience that I will never forget. Four teams were created from our class, and we were tasked with creating a Greenhouse Gas application, that tracked each user’s GHG production through different modes of travel. I was put into a group with eight other individuals, and we had to all work together to produce an application worthy of large-scale use.
Upon starting this class, I came in pretty rusty with React and Javascript, as it has been two years since I had last used those tools. I had to put some extra time and effort into re-learning the necessary skills to contribute to the overall development of the application. Upon re-learning the necessary skills, the next step was to figure out how to work as a team. Our team dynamic was for the first part of the semester very lone wolf-centered. The communication between teammates was sparse, and everyone was doing their own thing. This resulted in many conflicts between our team. These conflicts resulted in teammates including myself to not contribute fully to the project. These conflicts even resulted in the loss of one of our teammates who switched to another team. At that point, we were down a teammate and our team needed to get it together. We met up and had an intense meeting, which discussed the lack of team communication and what we needed to do moving forward. At that point, our team began to come together and fix the team dynamic. The weeks thereafter, we revamped our application and began to produce a product that our whole team became proud of.
With our team now working as a cohesive unit, I was able to start contributing more to the project. I was able to make changes that I was proud of. Even after we lost another teammate, our team was able to push to the finish line and produce an application that I can say I am proud of. Being in this class helped me gain much experience as to what I should expect in the software development world after college. It wasn’t easy trying to communicate with seven other individuals and having a team of that size required lots of meetings to make sure that everyone was on the same page. Before ICS 414, the biggest group I’ve had was three individuals including myself, which is tremendously easier to manage and stay on track. With a group as big as eight people, it’s very easy to fall behind. The most valuable thing I’ve learned was that software development is never an individual process. It requires communication with everyone else to make sure that everyone is on track. I’m glad I was able to take this class this semester because, without it, I am certain that my first job in software development or any programming job would be a massive culture shock.