Skip to content

App Development

Ajwad Shaikh edited this page Nov 22, 2018 · 2 revisions

Revving up the CPUs

The team moved from their abode in Grambharti to the NIF Office in Ahmedabad to get better connectivity to the Internet and other local experts in App Building. The team met with Mr. Hemant who is a professional App Developer in Ahmedabad. Mr. Hemant introduced the team to collaboration tools like GitHub and BitBucket. The team then created a public repository on GitHub under an Apache 2.0 License to start writing some code. One of the team members read up thoroughly on the ODK (Open Data Kit) Documentation that Ted had mentioned of to check if there is any scope of help.

Setting up environments

Before starting to collaborate on a single project, it was absolutely necessary to setup the exact same development environment on each of our systems. We upgraded our Android Studio (Desktop Application to help build and organise Android Development) and installed the same on systems that did not have it before.

Open Data Kit breakthrough

One of our colleagues realised that Open Data Kit could actually serve as a solid framework for our app and that we can tweak its powerful tools a little to exactly suit our needs. The team was then clear that the App should be built around an ODK framework.

Software Requirements Specification Submission

Once we got our hands on ODK, we had the tools we needed. Now, we deliberated and discussed what modules our system can have that can be carved out with these tools. A preliminary but exhaustive SRS was sent to Sagar Bhai for approval from the team at SRISTI.

Coding Right is Coding Overnight

Over the next two days, the team worked pretty much day and night in shifts to bring out a somewhat stable build of the application that could carry out the basic requirements, something like a prototype solution to our problem. We also built for ourselves a robust backend on Google Cloud Platform to export and visualize the data.

Version Handling

In an attempt to relate our version builds to the app-use environment, we decided that we could name our versions on some of the crops that are cultivated. Analogous to how Google names Android Versions over desserts. Our first build that we released on May 30, 2018 was called the ‘areca’ build. We are still working on the master branch and plan on releasing a much more stable and upgraded ‘barley’ build before the end of Summer School.

Find more about our Project, our Journey, and us on the links below.