The idea of the project was to create an app for an already existing product that would allow its users to store meter data such as serial number, readings and date on their mobile devices as well as on the backend.
We worked under supervision of Alexander Haferland and Veronika Babic from the Berlin startup urban energy. Veronika also was our Product Manager, who approved or declined our ideas and suggestions and translated to us the urban energy’s vision of the project.
From the very beginning we followed the Scrum methodology with bi-weekly sprint plannings, sprint retrospectives, and regular updates on our progress.
We started the development with creating mockup designs in Figma. Then they were checked by Veronika. Only after the approval we could start with the code implementation.
We didn’t have dedicated teams, therefore, everyone could choose what they felt interested to work on.
We also wrote a few guidelines on Notion that everyone was supposed to follow to have more order in our work.
For each task a merge quest had to be created and reviewed, tested and approved by at least one of the team mates before merging. This helped to reduce the number of errors and code smells in our project.
During our work we faced a lot of challenges. Some of them we successfully overcame and some, unfortunately, not. For example, at first we had to choose betweem React Native and Flutter as the frontend framework. We had to think about pros and cons of each framework to make a wise desicion. In the end, we decided to work with React Native. Though, its dependency on third-party libraries hindered our development of the barcode scanner and text recognition components because many libraries were already deprecated or not supported by their creators. Unfortunately, due to the incompatibility of the authentication implementation on the urban energy side, it was also not possible to make a proper login logic in the app.
However, all these challenges only made us stronger as developers. We’re very proud of what we managed to achieve without most of us having any previous experience as well as of how much we grew as a team and learned about the real development process during these four months.