Feeling lost? Well, so were all the other first year graduate students at WPI. 

Our task: help students, faculty, and visitors find their way around WPI's campus using a java-based application.

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10 weeks to build a fully functional desktop application that could route between buildings, between floors, and between rooms on a single floor, and show the route to the user in an understandable way.

Useful things  I learned

Example sequence diagram made for the project

Software Design Process

• Requirements Analysis
  • Creating UML Diagrams
• Documenting a game plan and sticking to it
• Developing using GitHub

Java
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• Object Oriented Programming has benefits
• Learned how to make a standalone desktop application

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Integration

• Collaboration tools
• Slack
• Tracking tools (Trello)-- but nothing beats post-its
• Language can be a barrier
• The point of UML/planning documents is so that you can evenly divide up development work

Things to watch out for next time

• Communication
• Setting expectations
• Agile works in software settings but requires greater time investment. However for this type of coding project (fairly well defined timeline + scope) agile > SDLC (waterfall)