Over the Fall 2022 semester in ICS 414, I was able to work with nine other classmates on a website made to demonstrate what was in the realm of possibility for the Hawaii State Legislature’s website, which was running on Lotus Notes at the time. It was the first time since ICS 314 that I worked on a group project, and the first time working with such a large group in general. It was at times difficult, especially since I was juggling multiple other classes and such, but I think we made a web application that fit the bill and showed our clients that what they wanted out of their application was indeed possible.
Working with nine people was definitely a daunting task, making sure we all had something to work on while also collaborating with each other definitely made things interesting. Following the guidelines set by our professor certainly helped us work with each other efficiently. We didn’t have any major hiccups, the worst being people not pulling from main before commits, but since we were all working in our own issues within GitHub, we were able to revert back the changes and avoided that scenario from happening multiple times. Looking back, I’m grateful that my group was good on communication. Most people responded quickly and were not against helping each other out with their issues. We understood that we were all busy with other classes and so long as we did our parts and were still talking to each other, we wouldn’t hold it against each other.
In terms of what features we were able to create, our most notable features were allowing users to track the progress of a testimony going through the approval process, a search function that allows users to view whatever is on the website, a notification system that alerts another user if a testimony is coming up, and an email system that sends an email information on a hearing. We were able to work on issues that Brandon and Stephanie both expressed interest in, and I think we did a good job at implementing them.
In terms of what I contributed to the project, I worked partially on the notification system above, but I also handled smaller parts like creating a user info backup system, worked on bits of the navbar, allowing specific roles to access their respective pages, testcafe, etc. I also made sure that our group knew what the current legislature website looked like and how the testimony process works, as there was some confusion while we were working on the project as to how exactly it worked and how the website should be laid out.
There are a few things that I think would make a lot of sense to be in the website that we either did not get to work in time or didn’t think to implement at the time. I would have liked to implement a system that allows people who edit testimonies to see any past edits and who exactly edited it. Another team showed a mockup of this function in their milestones and I thought it was a good idea but we never got around to it.
I also would have worked on the aesthetics of the website more as well, our website was very barren in that sense, we didn’t have any pictures and our pages were all primarily black and white. We may have created decent functionality but our website looked very basic, and I do think it would have benefitted a lot from some visual upgrades.