That's My Spot!
Overview
The one issue that has plagued students of UH Manoa ever since the invention of the car is finding a parking stall. This project is meant to alleviate that issue by allowing those with a parking pass to reserve an empty stall, so they can park there. It also allows people without a parking pass to get a stall, but they have to pay and are assigned one.
More information can be found out here
Issues
This was the first time any of us worked on a fairly large piece of software, so in the beginning it was the blind leading the blind. We had no real concrete direction or anyone to hold us accountable. Eventually we got in the groove and we were able to make good progress and ended up with a decent product at the end.
Future Development
Even though the project is “complete” there is still a lot more features to add that would really add large improvements to our project. Ideally our project would be directly integrated into the UH system to check who has a parking pass or not because right now the only thing between you and a parking pass is clicking a check box when you sign up your account. Another feature that would be nice to add is a way to integrate sensors into the parking structure to see when a stall has been left because, as of now, the user has to tell the app that they left the stall. A lot of these problems stem from it being an external website interacting with a UH system, but there isn’t much we can do about that.
Retrospect
Overall this project taught me many valuable things about working with a team on a somewhat large piece of code. The most important things is that planning out the direction and requirements to get to the end goal before actually programming can save a lot of effort compared to winging it and adding features that may or may not be in the final product.