Final Thoughts

ICS 413 has been a very eye opening experience for me. I was able to apply what I learned before from previous Java classes which I enjoyed since I don't like to learn things and not get to see some practical application for it.

Valuable Experiences:

I found that most of the class provided very valuable information and incite to the world of software development. I think that the group experience was the best part as we were able to share knowledge and see different views on how to solve a problem. SVN in particular was an interesting experience since we were able to work on the project even if we weren't together, plus the ability to revert to a previous version was a nice feature for the projects. Also the Ant tools added an interesting aspect to the development process as it allowed for testing and the catching of errors that we otherwise might have missed when just looking over or simply just running the code and assuming there are no errors. Lastly I thought that Wicket gave some interesting experience as well as an introduction to web frameworks.

More Experience:

The only thing I felt needed improvement in the class was the coverage of Wicket. I found that Wicket was a particularly difficult language to get a hold of and I thought that the book did a fairly poor job of explaining how Wicket works, plus having it available to only 4 people at a time was a major inconvenience. With that said I think that more time should be spent on Wicket in order for students to full grasp and get the hang of using the language.

More Learning:

After taking this class, I have come to realize that I do not want to become a software developer. While I did enjoy working in groups, I found that software development is extremely time consuming and has the potential to be extremely frustrating. So really I have no interesting in continuing my learning in this area. However if I had to choose an area, I would like to learn more about web frameworks (maybe not Wicket) and how they integrate with Java, HTML and various other languages.

Overall:

I found this class to be extremely helpful in that it gives a great overview of the process and the tools of software development. I enjoyed the experiences from this class, not only for the basic knowledge of software development and the great experience of working in groups but also the fact that this course has helped me decide what I would like to do with my ICS degree when I graduate (most likely networking and IT work).