Through Ups and Downs
08 May 2025As of this week, my team and I have brought our original project surrounding food waste reduction around UH Manoa to a close! Through each of the 3 milestones, we made sure to develop a large amount of our software at each checkpoint with lots of collaboration, trust, and dedication to each other and our website.
Effort Estimation
From the beginning of this project, we were told to keep a keen eye on the effort we put into our programming! This meant we’d have to log the amount of time a task would take us. I decided to evaluate my tasks one by one when creating them based on how long I thought they would take to complete. After that, I’d begin working on the task, carefully watching how much time had passed between coding and non-coding efforts.
While my estimations weren’t always the most accurate, I think gauging how difficult a task would be before starting on it was a good practice. It helped make me aware of how quickly and efficiently I could complete a task. If I went over my estimated time, I would then become aware of my programming limits and what I can accomplish within a certain window of time. The estimation being different from the actual effort I put in always served as a reflection of my capabilities.
My Actual Effort
Sometimes I would be able to finish tasks quicker than expected, and other times I would be growing old while staring at my screen. The benefit of measuring my actual effort goes hand in hand with making an estimation of how long a task of mine could take. With the estimation, seeing the actual amount of time it took to complete a task was a good way to track my productivity.
And while being timed, I could become more aware of how much time I was spending on one portion of a task. These practices, estimating and timing my efforts, did prove useful. At the very least, I could see how well I used my time and how much I could handle at once, so I wouldn’t say there were too many downsides to this exercise. Though it wasn’t the most accurate, and there were lots of pauses while my timer was going, it served as an encouragement to work more diligently.
The Finish Line
I can safely say that this project brought new challenges to software developing for me. This wasn’t the first time I collaboratively worked on a project through GitHub, but this was the most advanced experience I’ve had with coding on top of doing it as a team. And though several issues may have come our way, my team and I formed a bond throughout the remainder of the semester that made it really easy to work together. We encouraged each other to get work done and offered help wherever we could. I’m glad to have built a project in what I hope was a reasonable amount of time with my team members!