This project is the culmination of the Software Engineering course at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. In this project, our goal was to create a Java app that would be used by the Brigham and Women's Hospital employees and would complete various tasks. One of the main aspects of this project was creating a graphical map editor that would be used to display various service requests (Lab service request, Meal service requests, etc.) and their locations on the map. In addition to these requests, it would display all of the equipment in the hospital and their locations. Along with this map editor, there would be a dashboard that would display most of the data that showed up on the map that would be easy to understand for the employees. Separate from the map editor many service requests would be useful to the employees for whatever they needed. If they needed a meal for their patient they could request it and it would be written to the Apache Derby database to be completed.
One of my roles on our team was to be the Product Owner, in charge of prioritizing the user stories of our project. Each week, we had a new iteration of our application to complete, which came with specific requirements that had to be met, along with extra goals we wished to accomplish. In order to complete everything we needed for the week, I would start off each iteration by leading a sprint meeting, where we came up with all of the tasks that needed to be completed as a team, and assigned tasks to each member of the team, as well as assigning each task a difficulty rating. This would help plan out the rest of the iteration, and make sure that each member was getting a sufficient but equal amount of work. I would then enter all of our tasks into Jira, where members of our team could see what was yet to be started, in-progress, and completed. The role of Product Owner took up only a small portion of my responsibilities on the team, and the rest of my efforts were working as a Front-End Developer.
As a Front-End Developer, I mainly focused on keeping the UI consistent across all aspects of our application. This required coordinating with all of the Front-End development team to make sure we followed specific protocols when creating new features, in order to remain consistent. While not a requirement for our project, I advised my team to incorporate the use of CSS into our application, as it would make having a consistent UI a much easier task. Shown below are some examples of various pages from our application, meant to have the same aesthetic design as to not distract the user from their goal in using the application.
Login Page
Landing Page
Dashboard
Employee Viewer
One of my individual contributions to the project was the development of a preference settings page, so that hospital employees would have the ability to change the appearance and sound of the application to best suit their needs. One of the main goals of the preference page was also to make the application more accessible by adding color-blindness modes, allowing employees with various types of color-blindness to better operate the software, and therefore perform better in the workplace. Changes to the color-blindness modes can be seen below.
Preferences Settings
Default Settings
Achromatopsia Setting
Protanopia Setting
Each developer also had to create their own “service request”, a type of action that an employee may need completed, whether it be janitorial services, a patient's meal delivery, or my contribution — internal patient transportation, which can be seen below. This service request takes information about the start and end location of the transportation request, as well as the patient's name, assigned staff's name, and status of the request. When a request is submitted from this page, it is populated in the graphical map editor as mentioned previously, and shown below.
Internal Patient Transportation
Graphical Map Editor