Mobile application in the developmental phase for tourists, visitors & trekkers visiting National Parks in the US to report any spotted incidents, animal activities, & crimes
Developers: Adwait Chavan | Michelle Baginski | Olesia Danchuk | Ryan Gaul
Learn more about the developers here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adwaitchavan/
Developed for Software Engineering Course at the University of Illinois at Chicago
Park Pal is a mobile application in the developmental phase to be utilized by tourists, visitors & trekkers visiting National Parks in the US for reporting any spotted incidents, animal activities and crimes. As a team of four, worked on product scenarios & diagrams, stakeholders, mandated constraints, system design, design patterns & project issues. Formulated meeting minutes, Scrum, product use cases & diagrams, hardware/software mapping. Developed functional, performance, usability & other major requirements. Documented in a report.
At the conclusion of the development of the Park Pal App project, we realized how important it is to analyze, inspect and quantify the problems in our very surroundings, while finding solutions to them. The process of working with National Parks, in order to make the entire process of visiting and traversing the park was very rewarding. Of course, this did come with its own set of challenges. One of the biggest difficulties to overcome was being completely online for the end of the semester. This made meeting harder and it made presenting harder. But it also taught us remote engineering and gave us a good experience of working far yet together. Also, we used the method of directly analyzing the experience of users in the national parks, along with looking at the workings of park rangers, and realized that there needs to be a means to have better communication between users and park rangers. We also tried to hold online user surveys to understand their opinions, but those weren’t as useful as live interaction with visitors, helping us get their first hand experiences.
Apart from this, we also got to use the Requirements Gathering Technique of ‘Personas’, wherein we created an imaginary personality, using it as our user requirements guide. The Whiteboard Thinking diagrams proved to be helpful as well.