It has been a long journey and we are coming to the final stretch to complete our project which lasted for a whole semester. Looking back from day 1 when we just started our first discussion on our project, I realised that all of us have grown and picked up many skills. We have made mistakes, stumbled on various unforeseen circumstances, and yet we braced ourselves up and moved on. It is amazing to see how time flies and now we are preparing for our software demonstration. Reflecting on the path through our journey, I have learnt much and would like to share my thoughts.
Being handicapped in the field of computing, I have always seen past programming assignments a torture, and now I am working on an extensive software development project. It is definitely a painful task for me. I am glad that I am so fortunate to be in a team of elites, who share their knowledge willingly. I noticed that realising each individual’s strengths and potential is crucial in the development of a large-scale project. As each portion will be dependent on one another, it is important that all of us deliver our work on time. However, I have always been struggling with programming and hindering the team’s progress. Knowing the strength of individuals, we will split the jobs according to each abilities and this would improve the quality and efficiency of work. In our project, we have adopted this strategy as we need to do both the coding and documentation simultaneously.
Planning is vital in software development. Apart from the functionalities and requirements that need to be met, we must plan ahead how we want our journey of the development to be like. Definitely, planning alone is not enough, we must be able to stick to our plans. Procrastination will lead to last minute work and having our final product to suffer. Initially, we have taken this project lightly and neglected some factors which may affect our development. Along this project, we fumbled a bit due to holidays like Chinese new year, when we need to spend time with our families, our midterms to study for, and various assignments from the other modules. Failing to put these into considerations, we tend to delay our work and having to burn midnight oil to finish up our tasks. Therefore, we need to do proper planning before we start and be able to be on the ball as planned.
In the preparation of our software demo, I have viewed examples of famous speakers who market their products in a captivating manner. They are able to capture the attention of the audiences and maintain this level of attention throughout the demonstration. It is important that we understand the expectation of the audience and know clearly how our product can satisfy their needs. Putting these together we will be able to keep the audience begging for more to be delivered, instead of dreading to sit on for the boring talk. Having this in mind, we will rehearse within ourselves to obtain the responses we desire.
All in all, going through this course has been tough and we learnt through mistakes made from us as well as others. There will be more projects that we will need to develop in future, be it as projects before graduation or in the working society. I will be more careful in planning the schedule and setting our priorities right. Furthermore, listening to presentations made by others has been effective as we can reflect and improve ourselves.
