Student Developer

Overview

As part of ITU’s Second Year Project: Software Development in Large Teams, I worked on a software project in collaboration with IBM. The goal was to build an MVP for an open-source solution that could help companies understand the environmental impact of their transportation activities.

Our team developed a web-based solution centred around calculating CO₂ emissions from transportation. Rather than only presenting information about sustainability, the project provided a working API through which transportation data could be processed and translated into estimated emissions.

My role

I worked as a Student Developer within a larger development team. Unlike smaller university projects, the focus was not only on implementing software but also on learning how a larger team organises, coordinates and delivers a shared product.

My work involved contributing to the development of the MVP while participating in the team’s Scrum process, collaborating with other developers and helping turn the requirements of an external industry partner into a working software solution.

The problem

Companies increasingly need to understand the environmental impact associated with transporting goods and operating transportation networks. Turning transportation activity into a meaningful CO₂ estimate, however, requires a consistent way of processing the underlying data and performing the calculation.

The project explored how this process could be exposed through an accessible, open-source solution so that organisations could calculate transportation-related emissions without having to build the underlying functionality themselves.

The solution

Together with the team, I contributed to an MVP that allowed transportation information to be translated into estimated CO₂ emissions. A working API formed an important part of the solution, providing a programmatic interface for performing the calculations.

The intention was to make the solution openly available and provide companies with a free starting point for incorporating transportation-emission calculations into their own workflows and applications.

• Calculate estimated CO₂ emissions associated with transportation
• Expose emission calculations through a working API
• Provide a web-based interface around the underlying functionality
• Develop the solution as an MVP that could be iterated on
• Keep the project open-source and accessible to organisations

Working in a large development team

A major part of the project was learning how software development changes when many developers contribute to the same product. Features could not be developed completely in isolation: interfaces, requirements and implementation decisions had to be coordinated across the team.

This gave me practical experience with collaborative development beyond simply dividing a project into independent tasks. Changes needed to fit into a shared codebase and a shared understanding of what the product was supposed to become.

Agile development with Scrum

The team organised the project using Scrum, working iteratively rather than attempting to design and implement the entire system upfront. Development was divided into smaller pieces of work that could be discussed, implemented and evaluated throughout the project.

Working this way gave me practical experience with agile software development and showed how regular communication, prioritisation and incremental delivery help coordinate a larger engineering team.

Collaboration with IBM

Working with IBM added an industry-facing dimension to the project. Instead of developing solely from an academic specification, the team also had to communicate with an external partner and translate project goals into concrete software requirements.

That experience helped bridge the gap between university software projects and professional development, particularly around communication, requirements and delivering something that another stakeholder could actually evaluate and use.