A Home Appliance Fault Reporting Software System

Introduction

During my fourth year at University, I and three other MSci students formed a group and participated in the Software Engineering Group Project Dissertation module. We had IKEA Kitchen Services as our client for the project, who tasked us with the development of a system for staff, customers, and installers to assist with kitchen maintenance warranty and fault reporting.

Our final solution consisted of a website for staff members and two android mobile apps one for customers and installers respectively. All three interfaces were connected by our backend system developed using Google Firebase. Customers could attach products to their accounts, report faults on these products and see the status of their reports. Staff members can review all of these incoming requests and if deemed necessary can assign installers to faults; installers can then see all of these faults within the app. All the participants could communicate with each other via an inbuilt live chat system.

The project spanned the whole of the academic year and included both the production of our software solutions and a 25,000-word Masters's level dissertation which outlined: how we organised the team, our workflows, the design choices, the technical implementation, and system evaluation. Our final produced solution successfully met all of the client's original requirements and for the project, we were awarded a final score of 85%, a First class grade.

My role in the project was Lead Firebase Solution Designer and Developer. In this role, I lead the design for our back-end Storage system, Firestore database, Realtime database and wrote their associated security rules; ensuring the data was both secure and valid. Moreover, I wrote the TypeScript Firebase Cloud Functions and associated Unit tests. Providing any support to my team members with Firebase, so that we all knew how the system worked effectively.

In addition, I was one of the two Java developers on the Android development sub-team, working on both the customer and installer mobile apps. I worked primarily on the sign-up/ login screens, the Live Chat systems, and the report fault screen. Additionally, I helped with designing and implementing our MVVM structure, ensuring proper design patterns were enforced. I also set up our continuous integration and deployment pipelines.