Personal Reflection Report

Personal Reflection Report

Introduction

This is an individual reflective report that touches on the project I undertook in the development of the Quality Software and Systems Unit. The project involved building a mobile app that would serve people to make an appointment or cancel an appointment with their GPs any time anywhere with a connection to the internet. The app name is health in my hand app. The report contains my individual contribution towards making the project a success. It also contains evidence of my skills, including my strengths and weaknesses. As well, what I felt before and after participating in the project in my personal and professional way.

To begin with, I am happy to have had an opportunity of participating in this project. Participating in the project was something different as compared to all the other works I have undertaken before. I enjoyed working with my team members and also liked the idea and the whole concept of the project; as stated earlier was about a mobile app that would serve the people to make an appointment and cancel an appointment. The project also provided me with a chance to practice on my area, which is, designing and building of mobile app as well an opportunity to practice more about the designer and languages used for app development. Through the project, more opportunities were created with regards to meeting new people and learning the importance of working together and focusing on goals. As time went by, my team found a way of understanding and effectively communicating with each other, thus making the project a success.

Overview of the project

The main aim of the project was to build a mobile app that would serve the people to make an appointment and cancel an appointment. This app will serve the purpose of not only enabling people to take proper control of their health but also their well-being. Additionally, through personal experience and speaking with others, we have determined that accessing medical services can be daunting and confusing to any age group. We design to make this as easy as possible with our app. In encountering this app, first-timers will be able to download it, sign up for the app, and finally, locate the nearest GPs.  It possible for patients to receive, book, and cancel appointments from the GPs at the comfort of their zone. Moreover, patients can order prescriptions; all this with only just a touch of a button.

How the team settled on the project idea

After discussing with my team on the possible projects we could undertake, I proposed a project that would touch on app enabling people to take proper control of their health and well-being. The reason as to why I settled on this idea for people is because of my past college experience. During my college period, I used to design websites, enabling people to take proper control of their health. Thus, my past experience contributed a lot in settling on the project idea. After agreeing on the project to undertake, we started by looking at how other apps have been built before finally drawing a working time table and also deciding on the contents the website should contain. Later, outside the class, we discussed with each other about making a WhatsApp group as well as creating a shared folder on one drive to help us in keeping updated with any work that we undertook during the project. Then we used Microsoft Team allocated to share ideas, resources and communicate as a team.

Strengths and Weaknesses in the Project

Working in a team requires one to have some skills and abilities that can make him or her interact freely with the other members. I proved to be an excellent communicator during the whole period of the project. My practical communication skills helped me to put across my ideas to the team. For any project to succeed, communication is usually essential, especially when working in a team. Thus, excellent communication skills are a must-have for one to succeed in a team project.

Otherwise, communication breakdown may lead to the collapse of the project being undertaken. I was also a good listener during the project, which enabled me to get all the essential points from my fellow team members on how I should carry out my part of the project. As a result of being an excellent communicator and a good listener, I managed to work on my part of the project well without any difficulties and on time. Furthermore, I finished my part of the project much early and immediately embarked on helping other members to complete their part, which enabled us to meet the deadline for the project completion.

My other strength is that I was advantaged to posses’ excellent App designing skills that were critical when it came to the drawing and designing the first draft for the App home page.  To draw the first draft, I used pine and paper, then on Microsoft Word. After that, we drew and completed designing all the pages with my team. I enjoyed my role as I was the one tasked with designing and choosing the colour for our app. The team was delighted and happy with the App that I had designed for the project.  Hence, my experience as an App designer and developer contributed a lot to my success.

My role in the project has given me more ideas about how I can design an app and achieve my goal. My work has benefited my team because other members of my team were able to create App pages without any difficulty. For instance, they did not have to worry about what they had to do and where they had to put navigation links, images, graphic elements, and text. Therefore, they were able to create there page just by looking at a mockup design. Also, my role as a designer, I draw all UML diagrams for this app with my classmate Vana.

First, by drawing use cases diagram work, has benefitted my team because use cases have proved to be easily understandable by business users, and so have proven an excellent bridge between software developers and end-users. Second, the UML Class diagram unified modelling language for health in my hand app, which models the static structure of a system. It shows the relationship between class objects attributes and operations. The class diagram has benefitted my team because other members of my team as they were able to translate the model to programming code. Finally, we draw sequence diagrams to see how objects and components interact with each other to complete a process

Weaknesses of the project

The weakness of this project is that I used the MIT App Inventor website for building this app “health in my hand” and I did not understand any programming languages. Moreover, the MIT app inventor website is available only for Android. This is not enough for our app because we want our app to work for both Android and iOS. I should have used languages to make the app more useful and attractive. Nevertheless, I hope to gain more knowledge, as I have currently started learning more about the programming languages this year. I plan to practice using the programming languages by reading more books and doing more online research about them to build a better, more effective and attractive App for users in future when I have another opportunity to participate in a project.

Screenshot

Linked

Student Internship at LAB, during this project, has done much to empower me and others. I attended some research seminar that was very helpful for this project from Ms.Ana Tryfona, which was about mobile App support of children. It gave many ideas about designing and building mobile Apps. I also added a Screenshot of some attendances at Technology Career event:

Conclusion

This reflection paper has explained the role I played in the development of a Quality Software and Systems unit that aimed at building a mobile app that would serve the people to make an appointment and cancel an appointment with their GPs. I have also outlined the details of the project and my specific role as the team’s designer. Even, I have talked about how my role in the project benefited the other team members and the project strengths and weaknesses. Finally, I have also reflected on the new expertise and skills that I gained from participating in the project. As well, the identified gaps in my experience, skills, and knowledge. Likewise, how I plan to address them to increase my efficiency when it comes to app designing and building