Our starting point was an idea by our project supervisor, Mr. Till Leinen, and some wireframe designs he had already created to help us visualize his idea. The next step was to develop and implement a game plan. We began with regular Discord meetings to brainstorm ideas. We devised a rough development plan, and our user story mapping helped us in visualizing our MVP and future potential features for our application. We also debated whether we should create a mobile app or a web application. We decided to create a web application after much thought and consideration.
The ride was not entirely smooth from the start because we were a small team of four, and the first challenge we faced was figuring out how to crawl data from the German Parliament’s website. We were unsure about the legal implications, and, more importantly, none of us had any prior experience developing a web crawler. Thankfully, we were able to figure out most of our challenges and seeked help where needed. Roles were formed within the small team, with half of us focusing on specific aspects of the application and the other half jumping around as needed. We were able to progress at a steady pace thanks to our regular weekly team meetings and bi-weekly meetings with our Project supervisor, and issues were discussed and resolved on time. Because it was more convenient and faster, we conducted the majority of our interactions for this project online. Although we didn’t have much time left at the end for thorough testing, we had a working application that worked quite close to what we had envisioned at the start of the project.