Mobile app prototype developed on the Microsoft Xamarin platform
Mieliala Kysely is a mobile application prototype designed to proactively decrease bullying in social environments. It was developed for the University of Oulu research unit INTERACT as part of the “Project Work”- course included in the Bachelor of Information Processing Science degree programme.
The development team consisted of four full-time students including myself.
My main role in this project was project manager with network programming on the side.
The key results of this project include a novel design for an app to proactively decrease bullying in social environments and a prototype for future evaluation of its suitability.
Key features of the app include the ability to create, host and answer customizeable “mood”-surveys within a group and vote on group activities to respond to different trends within a group of people.
You can view the open-source project repository here.
Managerial tasks:
System implementations:
Other tasks:
The app was built on top of the Xamarin framework for cross-platform mobile apps utilizing .NET and C# which is well supported by the Visual Studio IDE. Figma was the primary design tool for UX and UI design. The project Scrum environment resided in Jira.
This project was a first in both project management and network programming for me. Project management was a role which I was not prepared for but was pleased to gain experience in. I’m grateful to have had this opportunity to challenge myself in a relatively safe setting.
Managing my first customer project was surely different from what I initially had in mind. Project planning and resource management are tasks that are far from enjoyable, but seeing the project run within schedule and yielding the expected results is rewarding. I’m proud of myself and my team for an overall successful project.
Client relations is another nut to crack. There are lots of things you must pay attention to when discussing the project with the client. I found it easy to ensure desicions are right by the team as I had a sufficient understanding of time required for various requests. What was harder was the ability to upkeep a confident character and answer the toughest of unexpected situations.
My team was excellent and I got to enjoy their full support throughout the project’s timeline. Regular communication and established task procedures ensured that everyone stayed on track. It was amusing to notice how enforcing Scrum activities is just as difficult as I’d heard. Daily scrums were immediately rejected. Understandable, none of us were budgeted to work on the project full-time which resulted in variable work hours.
For my small portion of hands-on development I learned surprisingly much. As stated above, I was responsible for all network code in the project but had no experience in the matter. In fact, no one in the team had, I of course volunteered. Networking is hard. I made lots of mistakes, and took my sweet time getting anything to even remotely function. But after all the struggles I came out a whole lot smarter.