Motivation
Researchers have primarily relied on spreadsheets to track their reagents. It is simple to set up, but becomes increasingly more difficult to maintain as their inventory grows. Not only that, it lacks features such as restrictions to inputs, efficient data lookup, and finer user permission control.
To address these issues, our clients devised their own custom solution created using Microsoft Power Apps. It improves on the spreadsheets in many aspects, but there are underlying issues which prevent it from being a fully-fledged solution. The primary problem being limited access – the app is not accessible to student researchers, effectively rendering it unusable for them.
There are existing solutions, but our clients found them to be either too expensive or don’t provide enough customization, making it unsuitable for their use case.
Approach
We were a team of six developers, which was a group much larger than what I was used to. This introduced new challenges like how we should distribute tasks amongst the team, coordinating tasks, and communication. Our team ended up using a pseudo Agile workflow, using a Kanban board to visualize all the tasks, Discord for communication, and GitHub for synchronizing and reviewing code.
Every two weeks, we had meetings with our clients where we would show our progress and receive valuable feedback, and then iteratively improve the website to better suit their needs.