And just like that, we are 5 months into 2022 and the Spring semester is coming to an end. ICS 414 was a programming-extensive course that further solidified and challenged my knowledge on web developement and team cooperation. Some things are an extension and continuation of ICS 314 like the use of Meteor framework. For example, in ICS 414 the professor addresses two issues of the meteor-application-template-react’s Stuffs collection. One being that we have little control over inserting, updating, and removing stuff. The other issue is we have to spread out the publish/subscribe code to too many files. The solution to these two issue is by wrapping the collection in a class. The class has methods for accessing the collection and doing modfications. And it also has a publish and subscribe method to create all the publications and subscriptions.
But of course this is a higher level course so naturally we learned brand new things like IDPM (Issue Driven Project Management). It is quite straightforward for a programmer when Github is life and you work on issues all day. But for those who don’t know what issues are, it is really just creating specific tasks that gradually builds up the application. Imagine you are building a house. A house is a house, but you need to plan out every little detail like where a specific outlet is going to be and how many of them you want. Then you assign that task to yourself or a teammate and have it done. Perhaps a house is not a great metaphor because it is not as easy to redo if the task turns out not the way we visioned it to be. But the general idea is that you provide enough detail so that a team member can implement it, but not so much that you “overspecify” and prevent the teammate from using the most appropriate solution.
We also learned about usability testing. “Usability testing refers to evaluating a product or service by testing it with representative users. Typically, during a test, participants will try to complete typical tasks while observers watch, listen and takes notes. The goal is to identify any usability problems, collect qualitative and quantitative data and determine the participant’s satisfaction with the product.” (citation). If you are interested in this you can Google more about it because there is a whole planning phase that would be too long to encapsulate and explain to you.
Everything else is similar to ICS 314, like using TestCafe to ensure pages correctly renders, and of course, we have to deploy the app.
All in all, ICS 414 was a very substantial course and I appreciate that we get to solidify what we have previously learned while building new knowledge on top of that. Because I would be more confident to say that I have experience in a certain area when I used it for two semesters compared to just dabbling in something for one semester.