Voluntree

Voluntree is a non-profit organization with the mission to help aspiring volunteers find community service opportunities and connect with organizers. The structure of ICS 414 revolves entirely around a single group project developing a React web application for a real client, providing students with a taste of the software company workplace experience. In the spirit of service, Sara Henley, the founder of Voluntree, volunteered to be our client for the semester. Her vision for the Voluntree website was a blend of social media and volunteer search sites—think of it as LinkedIn for community service and volunteer work. The class was divided into randomly selected groups of 6 to 8 people, each tasked with developing a web app for Voluntree based on her requirements and requests.

The key feature of Voluntree is Commit and Connect. Each community service activity (we call them Events in our web app) has a Commit button and a Connect button. When a user searches for community service activities that they may interested in, they can either immediately register themselves for the event by clicking “Commit”. If they want to contact the organizer for more information, they can click the “Connect” button.

My contributions to the site were to the profile pages, some of the site-wide styling, and the integration tests via TestCafe. I also led the weekly code reviews. It took a few weeks for me to settle into a role within the team. There were baby steps in the beginning, but as the semester progressed I began embracing the role of a floater, helping out where my teammates may be struggling.

A prime example of my contributions as a floater was with testing. Initially we had one person in charge of all the integration tests. As time went by, I noticed there wasn’t much progress on his branch, so I reached out and offered my help after I finished one of my tasks. My teammate was caught up with his other classes, so it got some of the load off his back, and I was able to contribute more to the group than just minor tasks here and there. Not only that, but I took a liking to writing integration tests.

Our team was called Ube-Dev, and you can learn more about our progress in developing the Voluntree web app in our development site here.