Lessons Learned from Conducting a Small-Scale Project
Conducting a Small-Scale Project
During my undergraduate studies, I have had the opportunity to experience various projects.
From my first project, where I knew nothing, to now, after a year of collaboration, I would like to share what I have learned and felt.
The Importance of Planning
To create a good service, good planning is essential.
A project that starts from a simple idea can become a great project when the stories of many people are added.
At the undergraduate level, this process is mostly limited to team projects or club activities, so to gain diverse experiences, it seems beneficial to participate in external competitions or events.
How to Design a Project
In the Capstone Design course, I had the opportunity to learn in detail about flowcharts and wireframes from my mentor.
First, I create a flowchart, and based on that flowchart, I develop a wireframe.
At this point, the most important thing is that all team members must share the same understanding.
One of the challenges I faced during projects was that many meetings were conducted verbally, and without documenting them, we often repeated discussions and asked the same questions repeatedly.
To prevent this, it is essential to create accurate documentation that can serve as a base for development.
I also learned about the Agile process.
How Should Meetings Be Conducted?
To move away from the haphazard meetings, I started looking into other projects.
Among them, I found the retrospective of Teo's Sprint, which was conducted based on Google Sprint, particularly interesting, and I applied it to our work.
Although there are originally more steps, I condensed the process into three stages: Canvas → Idea Sketch → Implementation.
In the Team Canvas, we conduct light ice-breaking by allowing team members to freely jot down their thoughts.
In the Idea Sketch, we write down ideas and select the final idea through presentations and voting.
During Implementation, we discussed how to visualize each feature based on the ideas to finalize the implementation.
Following this process naturally led us to one result.
Regardless of the final implementation, I observed that all team members were satisfied with the outcome of introducing this process.
How Should Collaboration Be Done?
I understand that in the industry, various collaboration tools such as GitHub, Slack, and Jira are used.
Since I thought that learning Jira would present a learning curve for other team members, we communicated using Slack.
On GitHub, we created a team organization to separate the frontend and backend repositories, and used projects to track issues by sprint for each repository.
In our projects, we used React, and after much consideration to implement a better architectural structure, I found a great article that served as a valuable reference.
Additionally, based on the Airbnb JavaScript style guide, we applied eslint and prettier rules to ensure consistent code syntax among team members.
Conclusion
I always feel that while conducting projects, there are moments when I think, I should have done this differently, or it would have been better to proceed in another way.
However, I also feel that as I progress through projects, I can approach the next one in a better way, and I am growing as a developer who wants to continue finding better methods.