Before we got to coding

We spent the first few weeks getting to know each other and learning the basic tools we would need for the project. We familiarized ourselves with agile software development practices, front-end coding strategies, and GitHub projects, issues, pull requests, and CI/CD pipelines.

We spent about 2 weeks developing a pitch for a recipe management application that is targeted to beginners and helps organize found and personal recipes. We created mindmaps, diagrams, user personas/stories, wireframes, and more to help guide our project direction. As team lead, I distributed and oversaw all of these subtasks, but I focused on creating the UI wireframes.

Dividing up tasks and Implementing Phase

Once we finalized our problem statement and project outline, we got to dividing tasks and implementing. I did my best to assign frontend or backend tasks to team members based on their preferences for either. Afterwards, I put my focus on design, front-end coding, overseeing team progress, and bridging front-end and back-end code. Specifically for front-end implementation, the home page UI, navigation bar UI, and TTS of recipe steps.

Sprints and Retrospectives

We conducted two sprints + retrospectives, one after 3 weeks of development and one nearing the end of development. We discussed what we accomplished, what we plan to do, and what fields our team could do better in. Our team respected each other and developed new skills. We agreed that the most important aspects that needed to be improved upon was our communication, accountability, and organization skills. With these in mind, we were able to complete an MVP in 6 weeks.

Final Product

Our final application, named Spatch, was a recipe management platform where users could utilize the following features:

• Search, filter, and bookmark other online or personal recipes
• Create and edit new or existing recipes for their personal collection
• Create cookbooks to organize found or personal recipes
• Use automatically set timers for each step of a recipe
• Use the TTS feature to read out the text in a recipe step

If you’re interested in trying out the MVP, you can try out our application here.

Final Thoughts

During these 6 weeks, I learned a lot about the agile software development process, managing a large team, and front end development techniques. And after I learned all of these new skills, I was able to release an MVP with my team! Of course, there is always room for improvement since we were quite limited in time and schedule availability (our team had to have our weekly meetings at 11pm…), but I’m proud that hard work and effort was put into a successful software engineering project.

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