gladysbenitez/hratx41-travella

a personal travelling assisting schedule application

Travel done the way you like it!

Travella Contributors:

Fawnie du Plessis	Gladys Benitez	Jimmy Hung	David Guenther	Maria Navarro	Louis Rangel
Project Manager	UI Owner	Architecture Owner	Engineer	Engineer	Engineer

Introduction

- We would like to bring a better user experience for frequent travellers
- Our goal is to do MVP with some additional functionality.
- Visually we want the application to look amazing and include some additional features beyond MVP.

What does the app do?

• Travella is a personal travel assistant application.
• Travella builds an unique customized travel itinerary according to the users travel dates and destination.
• Travella is for any traveller, experience or first time traveller.
• Travella addresses a very specific need, it customize your travel needs and give you selective options.
• Travella assist by addressing the issues of the internet being flooded with none relevent info.
• Travella only gives the user relevent current info.
• Users will enter their destination and travel dates and the app does all the work for you!
• Travella will offer you an array of options that are all categorized.
• Users custom build their itinerary at a click of a button.
• User can edit changes or delete any options choosen and easily make changes to their itinerary.

Tech stack

• ReactJS
• JavaScript
• Axios
• MongoDB
• Mongoose
• NodeJS and Express
• Node-Fetch
• Async Await
• Google API
• Bootstrap
• Material UI
• Figma
• Jest
• Travis CI

Technical Challenges and research that you anticipated

• Using figma to visually build out the user interface

  • We used figma as it was a great fit as a visualization tool with the needs of our product.
  • We used Figma to create amazing visual wireframe layouts for our application.
  • Figma offered a great way for the team to gather feedback all in one place.

• Using the React vertical time line library to create an itenerary with a vertical time line

  • Best option to visaully display the itenarary for our travel application.
  • Obstacles we faced was working with with the main back ground images and bootstrap modals.
  • Reading documentations with trail and error until we resolved all bugs.

• Using React bootstrap for styling and modals

  • Bootstrap offered grid styling layout with an option to use cards and modals. For our project this was a perfect fit.
  • Obstacles we faced was modals hidden behind the back ground.

• Material UI

  • Material UI has a responsive beautiful sidebar menu that overlays over the main page.
  • Material UI is a popular UI library that the team agreed to learn and use.

• Git workflow

  • Ensuring the team follows a set workflow as we working off one code base.
  • Correctly working off feature branches when the team creates new features.
  • Rebase to development and testing the code via a pull request before it gets merged into master.
  • As the code base is deployed we want to ensure that the code is working bug free before it gets merged with master.
  • We set up a Git Workflow document for the team to guide everyone and also did one on one session.

• Navigation of front end pages

  • Issue we faced was the ccs files not interacting correcly.
  • Had to seperate each components css into it own css page and added it to the component
  • Componenets need to share state and use the sae HTML page
  • Native React was used to dynamicly render each component by setting state with conditional rendering

• Data flow between each component, server and database

  • Ensuring that the team fully understand the data stucktures we will be working with.
  • Ensuring each team member knows the flow of data and how each component will interact with the data.
  • Ensuring each team member understand when data will be store in state or in the database.
  • We did whiteboard session with the whole team talking and drawing out the flow of data.
  • Team members worked in pairs and groups to ensure everyne is interacting with the data correctly.

• Using Google API to parse data from Google

  • Google API was robust enough and offered all the data we needed for our application
  • Google API had additional references attached to the data that allowed us to search more spesific data as needed.
  • Doing multiple API requests was challenging with asynchronous data and parsing all the data that was needed.

Challenges that were unexpected

• GitWorklow - Rebasing after each feature and understanding and following the Gitwrokflow set out

  • The team did not follow everything outlined in the Gitworkflow. Rebasing after each feature did not take place.
  • This caused a lot of additional manual work where we needed to copy over code before we could review it.
  • The team will ensure that they pratice and undertand the Gitworkflow outlined in the future before any coding starts.

• Data from the API

  • Fully understanding what the data is the we getting back from the API and how we will structure the data.
  • Better communication on a daily basis on the data points, flow and structure.
  • Whiteboard the data flow and data reveived from the API and how the rest of the team will interact with the data.

• Implementing more testing after each feature

  • The team did not implement testing after each feature.
  • In the future we need to follow the Gitworkflow and add testing to this process
  • No coding will be reviewed with out testing done first.

Video Demo / Screen shot walkthrough of the app

Wire Frame Screen Shots

How does the app work?

• The user enters in a destination on the Search Bar Page component of the React Application.
• The application makes an API call to Express server.
• The Express server makes an API call to Google API and scrape the appliable data needed.
• The data received from Google API is constructed into an object and send to state in React.
• The Category Page component extracts the data from state and display the data according to the users category preferences.
• The user makes seletions in each category and these options selected are send back to the Express server.
• The Express server saves the data into MongoDB with a quiery and uses the user name as a reference when saving the options.
• The Itenarary Page component make a Express server request for the applicable optiond according to the users name.
• The server makes a quiery to the databse for the data and send the options back to the Itenanrary Page componant.
• The Itenarary Page component displays the options using Reacts time line library
• The user have the option to delete the options selected in the itenarary, or display more info on options.

What research was required?

• Researching APIs to scrape and use for the data that is needed for this travel assistant application.
  • Google API
  • Flicker API
  • OnSplash API
• Researching new technologies and additional libreries with React.
  • Boostrap for styling
  • Material UI for styling
  • Travis CI for Testing
  • Jest for testing
  • React router for pagenation
  • React vertical Time Line component for the itinerary time line page
  • React Google maps to add maps to all pages and activities

Workflow and Key lessons from your team - specifically those related to: Agile, CI/CD, testing, working with external stakeholders, ticketing, and user stories.

• The team followed Agile workflow methodology
• Everyone did amazing work on the style guides.
• The team only did work when a ticket was issued
• Detailed user stories was created during the meetings with the external stakeholders
• We need to follow the Gitworkflow more carefully and adhere to the procedures set out with regards to rebasing
• Commit messages need to be more descriptive
• Code Review
  • Folder structure and data structure need to be defined upfront.
  • conflicts will only be tracted if the naming conventions was adhere too
  • Before the merging happens the developer need to remove any innecessary info include packages etc.
  • Adhere to commiting and following the gitworkflow that was set out
• Testing need to be done after each feature and before any reviewing is actioned
• Link to: Travella Trello Board
• All tickets was completed
• We did a total of 40 implementation tickets as well as bug tickets, research tickets and info tickets
• We did minimal test writing and this is a focus point to continue to work on
• We used Jest to write tests and Travis CI to intergrate the tests

Any non-MVP tickets (optional)

• Code refactorings
• Performance Optimizations
• Additional features

Notes from your Sprint Retro

• The team worked well together, there where effective communications and team work

• Everyone in the team had great soft skills

• Everyone on the team followed the Agile methodology

• The team leverage off each others strenghts

• The user interface visuals was very well planned out and thought thru

• The team did pairing work on all the different features and components

• The team had one vision on styling

• Over all the team work in harmony and there was a great vibe in the team

• Morning standups

  • In the future include an overview of how the frontend developing team and the backend devolping team is doing
  • Discuss more in detail any additional interactions that is needed between front and back end teams

• Setting up a moch data base

  • For future projects we need to setup a moch data base with moch data
  • We need to better understand what data the API is giving us back vs what we expected to get back

What additional features do you plan to add, how do you plan to implement those features?

• Additional features
  • Adding a login page with authentication
  • Adding multiple users
  • Adding multiple cities to the itinerary
  • Adding multiple dates to the itinerary
  • Email/google calendar or share with friend options to itinarary
  • Swapping around activities on the itineratry time line
  • Clicking on the icons on the itinaray page to give you similar option to change the activity
  • If time is already allocated to an activity the user is informed.
  • Continuous refactoring of code