“Software Engineering is just another class I need for my Bachelor’s Degree” or so I thought. Just like any other student, I have been going through the motions in attempts to earn my degree. And of course, I held the same point of view heading into Software Engineering (ICS 314). However, I was not expecting to learn the amount of quality content I had during this course.
Standards are applied to basically everything in our lives. There are standards for the way we speak, how people dress, the people we date, and most importantly, the way we code. Coding Standards pertain specifically towards code structure and syntax. Such coding standards were enforced within IntelliJ through the use of ESLint. However, there is no “ESLint” within the real world, but we can become it. Software Engineering has taught me that I should not rely on tools to enforce habits, but rather I should rely on myself. Sure, we had ESLint running throughout most of the course, but when I noticed that whenever it was not running correctly, I would automatically expect certain errors when they were not underlined in IntelliJ. Standards are something we should maintain and hold ourselves up to, always.
No group of people working towards a mutual goal would work efficiently without some form of management. In the case of ICS 314, our management was provided to us in the form of Agile Project Management, specifically Issue Driven Project Management. Issue Driven Project Management is a process designed to support multiple developers working on the same software. The developers are to meet twice a week to manage the project, divide the work efficiently, and document each task as a GitHub issue, along with its other processes. During the Final Project module of ICS 314, Issue Driven Project Management played a crucial role into the development of our project. It held as our main source of communication between each other as new issues would arise on the Project Board, along with the progress each member has made with their issues. If we were to look at Issue Driven Project Management fundamentally, it does not have to only apply to software developers, but it can also apply to any group project. Although it may not work as effectively as it did during ICS 314, Issue Driven Project Management definitely applies in terms of division of work and communication between members, and maybe it could work out better than before.
Software Engineering has left an impression on me as a student that I would have never expected. It has given me the experience of working with others in developing software and has opened up my mind to certain methodologies and ideologies. The professor told us that we are just still at the very beginning of our coding careers, and ICS 314 has taught me that what he said was incredibly true. Although it is jarring to believe such a thing, I am hopeful for what is to come during my endeavors.