Ottawa Grassroots App

Posted on Tuesday, March 30th, 2021

Client	Ottawa Grassroots Festival
Professor(s)	Su Cheng Lee, Adesh Nilesh Shah
Program	Mobile Application Design & Development
Students	Project Lead – Alex Carmichael Design Lead – Tyler Bristow Development Lead – Kiet Vuong Full-Stack Developer – Hisham Almoli Front-End Developer – Kendy Dor UX Designer – Helen Le

Project Description:

Our project deliverable was to create a mobile application for the Ottawa Grassroots Festival. The goal was to create an interactive and engaging app to expand their reach and engagement. It was important that the application focused on accessibility and had a simplistic design to be usable to a wide range of user types including festival-goers, volunteers, and festival organizers. With accessibility in mind, we also created an intuitive admin dashboard to facilitate content management for the app.

KHAT Development, a team, composed of Alex Carmicheal (Team Lead), Tyler Bristow (Team Second/Design Lead), Kiet Vuong (Dev Lead), Hisham Almoli (Full-Stack Developer), Kendy Dor (Front-End Developer), and Helen Le (UX/UI Designer), was formed for the sole purpose of accomplishing the client’s project brief. Having a team with a wide range of skill sets, it was challenging to assign particular tasks to team members. However, throughout the project, we learned how to communicate remotely and contribute in our own ways. To manage the project’s scope, we used different online management tools to help alleviate stress, increase productivity and meet deadlines.
We learned a lot throughout this project. We learned how to interact with the client to get the information we needed to deliver the product that met all their needs. We implemented skills that we learned in our previous courses to design and develop the mobile application. We conducted research and usability testing to ensure overall accessibility for event-goers, volunteers, and administrative staff.

With Ottawa Grassroots Festival being the first actual client for many of us, we needed to follow what we were taught to ensure a seamless development process. To start, we completed extensive technology research that helped us understand the tools and features required to complete our project. With this research, we were able to pinpoint the best services (Firebase) and technologies (React-Native and ReactJS) for our client within the project’s scope.

Our team used a development version control tool to allow team members to add features and perform peer programming simultaneously. Being new to document databases, the team learned how to design and create extensive schemas to hold the application’s content. Having proper documentation and research, the development team efficiently conducted software testing and corrected any bugs that arose.

With the project complete, we can say that this was the biggest project we’ve all had the opportunity to work on. Although we faced many challenges along the way, it was an experience that deepened our knowledge regarding mobile application projects. We’re grateful to have worked with a fantastic client that was always understanding, supportive, patient, and flexible with our team. In turn, this project helped us improve the transition to our professional careers once we graduate. To our client, professors, and Algonquin College we would like to thank you for this incredible opportunity.