B5 Bachelor Penny Pincher

Once we agreed on a design concept, we decided to split into different groups to work on the different pages: live feed, browser, favorites and extended view. Since none of us had previous experience with Flutter, we had to briefly familiarize ourselves with the framework. By the 8. of November we already had a simple mockup of these four pages.

Working separately like this required a lot of communication, so we had meetings on Monday and Thursday every week which were mainly on discord due to Covid. During the meetings we discussed what has been done since the last meeting and what needs to be done for the day. Everyone was on different voice channels for co-working which enabled us to ask each other freely for help and advice. Thanks to the Design Sprint, we were able to fill our backlog with a lot of tasks and issues. Throughout the development phase we kept adding new issues, made up new user stories and continuously improved our app. Through our hard work we already had a complete protoype of the app by the end of November, so we decided to make a second official Design Sprint to discuss app optimizations and new features.

Throughout December we implemented the ideas from our Design Sprint. We decided to add a Welcome Screen, where the user can choose the categories he’s interested in. We were also able to refactor our code. And in January we worked on further optimizations and implemented the new and improved Live Feed version. Our app looked like this on the 10. of January:

Even though we had no experience with Flutter or working on such a big project beforehand, our team stayed motivated until the end! Not only did we create something great, but we also made longlasting friendships and learned a lot about managing a project and building an app. We experienced a couple of complications: in a team of nine people, it’s easy to lose the overall view of who has done what, and what problems need to be solved. Sometimes there were merges into main, that weren’t discussed beforehand. That led to unnecessary bugs and stress. Nevertheless our team stayed focused and we always voted fairly and acknowledged each other’s opinons, which helped us create a very nice atmosphere. We were all very excited to work on such a big project for a company such as Idealo.