In the second year of my studies in Software Engineering, I had to take on a software development management unit. The unit lets us develop a project in a team for our final project.
The unit titled FIT2101: Software Engineering Process and Management emphasizes teaching about a particular type of management technique in software development known as AGILE Scrum. This type of management technique focuses on delivering a working product in increment to the client. There’s no in depth analysis of what the client wants, instead, build a working prototype and asks the client if what is being delivered works for them or not.
This type of management technique relies on the fact that the client themselves may not fully understand what they want out of a product and works around any future problems that may occur due to the client changing his minds on the requirement of the system.
In the final project of this unit. We were divided into teams and were told to create a project management software for lecturers to use to keep track of their students’ assignment progress. Since this is a management unit, the emphasis is mostly on the documentation of the product, instead of the quality of the product. Obviously, a product that does not work reflects poorly on the management of the team but, that is not main criteria that is looked at in this project.
One of the tools we used for this unit is Trello which is a type of Kanban, a scheduling management technique. Basically, based on the requirements, we created a list of tasks that is categorized acording to their progress. Trello made this easier since the tasks can be made into cards which can be dragged to different boards based on their categories. The picture below shows how the board looks like at the end of the project.
We also used git with quite a bit of branches since 5 members are involved in the team. At the end of the day, we were able to complete a workable product. Links to the project repository and web page below:
| No. | Link |
|---|---|
| 1. | Repository of final project |
| 2. | Link to final project page |
In the team, I play the role of QA tester which primarily deals with checking boxes to make sure the requirement for the project is delivered. I mostly deal with blackbox testing although, in hindsight, if I had more time to work on the project, I should have use unit testing, which can be used alongside git that will life a lot easier.