Saving everybody some Green$: GreenOMeter 2.0

During the last month or so, we (the same team as previously mentioned in my post for GreenOMeter v1.0) have been working on this application GreenOMeter. With the specifications, we started to implement functions for the 2.0 version of GreenOMeter. This time around, I feel that we were much more organized in the distribution of tasks. For the final end result of GreenOMeter v2.0, we have seperated the stop light and the grid onto two different pages, adding three more pages about the functionalities of the application and our contact information.

I have to say this time around was a very interesting experience and as this was my first time thinking in the mindset of a software engineer versus that of a programmer I see a clear in distinct difference in what outcomes the they produce. We initially thought "Hey! Let's add in every feature possible!" and I was definitely mental pushing towards that direction, ok so yea I did implement some wasted code like facebook integration to allow users to post the current chart or green days to their facebook accounts. Ultimately I applied the rules of Software Engineering I learned through the course and decided to drop it until we first determined completely how to implement all required functionality and start on that. Once we felt safe in our progress in that area we could proceed to add bells and whistles.

I had a lot of fun and I am very thankful to my group for coming together to tackle task. We developed a technique of switching task as we learned more about ourselves and each other to allow for the best possible outcome. We didn't go for a hey, let that guy do all the coding or documentation method. We even stapled off the only let the guy who seems the best at programming handle the hardest task. What we did was give everybody a decent range of task to in each area and if they got stuck another group member or the whole team would converge on the issue to solve it.

At the end of it all, we had a fully functional application that presented with a good and well thought through user interface.

Using the User Guide page on our Google Code project hosting website, you can take a look at our project.