Clinical Tracking App

Background

This project was sponsored by Erik and Sinead Yarberry from the OSU College of Nursing. They wanted an application that would allow their instructors to fill out and store their evaluation forms on tablets so they could move away from their paper system. This was a brand-new project with no code written at the start.

Every CSE student at OSU is required to take one of the many capstone classes during their senior year. The main idea of capstone is that you work on a project that will allow you to demonstrate everything that you have learned during your 4 years at the Univesity. I took the software engineering capstone, which required you to work with a 3rd party sponsor to elicit, refine, and implement the project requirements throughout the semester.

The Team

Challenges

OSU Authentication

One of the key features the sponsor requested was adding the ability to authenticate via OSU credentials. This would allow instructors to seamlessly adopt the new application while also reducing the amonut of data we would be responsible for. Actually getting this to work was a long series of events, but Ryan and Kathy worked tirelessly to figure it out. The tools we could use to configure authentication were restricted by the College of Nursing.

Adjusting to React Native

React Native is a strange framework. I've done my fair share of native Android applications, but React was a completely different experience. The lack of built-in components was strange and I felt like we were dependent of the existence of 3rd party libraries for anything non-trivial. Fortunately, there is a lot of stuff out there for React Native.

Database

We ran into a few issues configuring SQLite for the application, which required some slight restructuring and reworking of things. We had actually intended to start with a NoSQL cloud database, but the sponsor suggested we start with something local to prevent the scope from growing out of control.