Marine Way Application

Project Description:

To maintain a sustainable environment, it is important that we take care of it. Fishing nets and other fishing gear continue to catch fish even when they are lost. When this equipment stays in the oceans it can causing leaching of microplastics into the water. The Canadian Government through the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) has made it mandatory that when equipment is lost it must be reported. This process currently is not intuitive and is cumbersome.
Marine Way has positioned themselves as a leader in helping keep the oceans clean and have commissioned an Android App (and iOS app later this year) that will make the process for the commercial fishing industry quicker and easier to submit the mandatory forms to DFO. In addition to the mandatory commercial forms, Marine Way has also added to the app the ability for anyone to report found gear, and if the gear has entangled wildlife.
The solution for the Marine Way app became bigger than just an Android app, what was needed was a full stack solution so that their iOS developer would also be able to integrate into the system. For the backend of the system, it was important to find a low/zero cost solution as Marine Way is a non-for-profit volunteer organization. The Team was able to find a scalable no cost cloud hosted server and database solution that will all allow the Marine Way to grow without heavy front-end costs.
The backend solution was also designed to be device agnostic. Not wanting to limit the ability to report the lost gear due to what device people were using the team came up with a plan to create a REST API server so that both Android and iOS devices could push their form data with the same backend solution.
The biggest technical challenge on the Android app side was to solve the issue that the end user will more than likely be out of internet access as the would be in the ocean when they realize they have lost gear. The team came up with a solution that allowed the form requests to sit in a persistent queue until the phone’s internet connection is restored, where all the form requests would then be sent to the sever.
The android app v1.0 was inherited from a previous team that focused on indirect features such as tidal tables, weather, maps and the DFO form came across as a secondary feature. The team needed to pull the DFO forms to be the primary feature ensuring that they were easy to complete and intuitive.
As a team on this project, we realized that it was important to stay engaged with our clients. Even with weekly meetings there was still change and having a strong client bond made changes easier and quicker and ultimately a more satisfied client.

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