Hotel Management

The final project of my ICS 212 class was a group project where we were split into groups of four in order to implement a program according to the specifications of the professor, and we were only allowed to work on it in class. The intention was to further practice our ability to work in groups and hone our ability to communicate and work efficiently through splitting up the tasks. Our group had a few minor communication issues and strictly adhered to the time limits for better or worse. Ultimately, we didn’t manage to create a program that worked as well as we liked, but it did help to teach us the value of communication, the value of teamwork, and the importance of time management.

If my memory doesn’t fail me, I in charge of implementing a couple functions and helped create one of the main parts for the main function. One of the functions I worked on was a searchCustomer function which brought up the information about a specific customer’s room by inputting the customer’s name. As I recall, I was not proud of how I implemented as I later realized I could have optimized it more and cut down on some reductive code, however, with the time constraints we had, I was mostly focused on getting something functional so that our team as a whole could test everything and I could figure out how to handle edge cases and different errors. A major problem we would encounter was the order that we did the functions, as some functions would require other functions to be able to fully test, so an important aspect that was learned about proper planning and utilization of time and resources. I do not recall if the other function I did was actually required or just a helper function to make other bits of code for everybody easier, but I created a function to calculate the stay duration of a customer. This actually recquired a bit more logic than expected due to the fact that I had to account for leap years and other oddities with how our calendar tracks time. Ultimately, this function also wasn’t optimized to its fullest, so I was also quite discontent, but for the limitations we had and the effort we put forth, it is what it is. Finally, I made headway in developing the menu in our main function. I think I just made a skeleton for all the options, that eventually each person would expand on for the functions they worked on. As I recall, someone else was also working on the menu due to a failure of communication on my part, but ultimately he wasn’t able to get it to work due to some arbitrary operating system difference or something like that, so we ended up using my code.

Though this project does seem like a major failure and a bit of an eyesore, it was a good learning experience, and ultimately through all the headaches, it was quite fun in hindsight. The lessons I have gained from this trial will help me a lot. Group experiences will be a common thing after all, so the merits of good communication and time management will be relevant for all eternity.

Source: Final Project Presentation