This was one of the classes I was really expecting to love when I did registration. I loved the web development part of ICS 314 and I thought this class would’ve been true real life experience since we’re working with actual clients. But this class was harder than I would’ve expected.
One thing I didn’t like about this class was that we didn’t get to choose our groups. Now, I get your intentions to make it feel like the real world where you don’t get to choose who you work with, but some of the people in my group really made my motivation and excitement for this class drop. One of the team members was previously in my ICS 314 final project group. She basically didn’t help nor worked with us as a team last semester. So her reputation with me was already bad before 414. Of course, I tried to ignore it this semester since my group didn’t have this experience with her and I was hoping she would change this semester since it’s new people, but she ended up doing the exact same thing but worse. She did nothing and looking at the branches she did make, she didn’t add any code and didn’t merge her branches to main, which is why she doesn’t even show up as a contributor for the repo. The only thing she seemed to do for the group work were the code reviews. I really hoped she would redeem herself but she didn’t in my eyes. Our other team memmber was alright, told us she had a funeral for one of the months and that’s when she stopped working on the code. She did pull through though by making sure the github.io page was always updated. I think the rest of us started giving up on this project after learning that none of us would be putting wholehearted effort into our website, which made this project really suck. It was hard to talk to everyone directly because we didn’t have a time we were all WILLING to meet up so we stopped doing our meetings after two times. I wish we could’ve worked this out somehow.
This class sucked, but it really wasn’t your fault. I think we were just an unlucky group to be together as a team. Creighton and Rodney were nice people to work with, but their needs were a little hard to understand. Maybe it would’ve been easier if we understood each other and the terms. The excel sheets they provided were helpful but it wasn’t enough for us to fully understand everything. I think it would’ve been cool if we were able to talk to them in real life to make sure everyone’s fully engaged and understand what to do.
If I could, I would’ve tried this class again to see if I’m really not for Software Engineering or if it was just an unlucky semester.