StudyBuddy is a task management application that I built for a software engineering school project (for CS2103T). I went into the module without pre-forming a team because I wanted to work with students that I didn’t know before. I must confess that I was slightly worried about our teamwork on the first week. But after a couple weeks of getting to know each other, we managed to work together pretty well. Most of our team members had very busy schedules this semester for various reasons, so I was really impressed that we managed to morph the initial codebase (an address book application) into a different and feature-complete project.
Prior to this project, I mostly worked on projects on my own. So there was a lot of takeaways regarding teamwork here. I learnt about unblocking my teammates when they are facing trouble. For example, one of my teammates had a problem with understanding Git and its workflows, so I explain the workflow in detail to him. Through this project, I realized that helping my teammates is not only a nice gesture, it also keeps everyone motivated and adds to the team’s momentum.
Another key takeaway from this project was writing tests. Although I’m not using junit tests in my personal projects, I now use other testing frameworks like Jest. Moving forward, I’m thinking of learning Ruby on Rails and use its testing framework as well. A common practice among Ruby on Rails developers is Test Driven Development (TDD), which involves writing tests before writing implementation. I feel that this is a sound approach. From working on open-source projects, I know that many new contributors have a tendency to write tests only when needed, and write tests that are unlikely to catch any errors. If they had used TDD, their test quality would probably improve. But somehow, TDD is not a very common practice in the Javascript ecosystem. So, I am interested to check out Ruby on Rails for my next project! :D
