I worked on this project in my second year at the FHNW. Just like in Monomo we were working in a team of eight people over the course of a whole school year. This time, however, the client was not internal at the school, but rather an external, real world client. This of course meant some changes to our approach to the project, mainly concerning our communication with the client.

Right from the beginning it was clear that this was going to be an Angular app. Most of our team members had to learn a lot before they could even start developing parts of the product, so initially progress was a little slow. We separated the team into two groups, one of them working on the front end while the other one was working on the back end parts of the system.

Aside from the difficulties in working with Angular we had some initial struggles with understanding all the terminologies that are used in a regular scouts organisation. Because of this we had to spend some additional time with the old application and the client so that we could be sure which parts are still needed and how we could integrate them into the new system.

Things I've learned

I was responsible for the project management discipline during the first half of the semester. While I've had some courses and the topic it was still the first time that I actually had to apply those learnings in a practical situation. Creating schedules and estimations seemed like a daunting task at the beginning, but once I got confident in my role as project manager, things started to seem a lot more clear.

Being a project leader for the first time lead to experiences in the disciplines of a project manager, but also in dealing with my team mates as both a fellow developer and the manager. I found it easiest to lay out a broad schedule for the project and then divide up the workload to the two groups and let them handle more detailed planning. This worked very well in this project.

Technologies I've used

In the past I've worked with Angular on smaller sample projects, but never on an actual project. I found the framework surprisingly easy to learn with all its terminologies and best practices. Angular certainly has lots of benefits, but in the end I found React far easier to work with.