BoatTrippy

Over the last six months I’ve been building and launching a web app for a local kayaking club to help them organise club trips, book club equipment and arrange car shares for the trips. Previously, the club used their forum to arrange trips, which although worked, wasn’t ideal as the members needed to be familiar with a complicated protocol around using the forum to arrange a club trip.

It was important that the new application could be integrated into the existing forum, so one of the design features was to use action and resource based URLs (links) that could be used to access different parts of the app.

What technologies did I use?

The technology stack used is Angular 9, .NET Core WebAPI 3.0, and Azure SQL Server. The app is deployed into Microsoft Azure and used Microsoft Azure DevOps to build, test and deploy the application. For more details on the development, take a look at the project blog which covers the initial 20 sprint build out period. I found this stack very easy to work with and very few gotchas/blockers along the way.

To get productive on this stack, I took a great Udemy online course to bring me up to speed with the latest versions of Angular and .Net Core API.

How did I develop and test the application?

The application was build using a Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) approach, story by story. I had test suites for the Angular client using Jasmine and ngTest and for the Web API, I used XUnit and MOQ. I also used Protractor to write a suite of automated ‘smoke’ tests. The sprint planning was managed in Azure DevOps.

Once the minimum viable product MVP had been developed, I set up some trial sessions with the users to create ‘imaginary’ trips and try out the planning, booking and car share features. I also asked the club officials to try out the restricted areas of the app that were applicable to them. These sessions gave me some great feedback on the app that I could plug into future development.

Feedback

The feedback from the club has been really good. Users particularly like the ease of use, particularly of the equipment booking, and the intuitive nature of the application. We’ve now deployed the application into the club’s new Azure subscription and are ready to go live. Here are some of the comments received:

Thanks for the session for BoatTrippy tonight! It’s brilliant and it’s super intuitive. … can’t wait for it to be rolled out.

Club Member

This looks absolutely wonderful! Thank you so much for your work on this. It looks amazing – I’m very impressed!

Club Canoe Rep

This is amazing!! Everything I tried worked super well.

Club Seakayak Rep

This is such a brilliant resource and improvement on equipment booking – massive credit to you for putting this together.

Club Equipment Officer

Future Development

The next set of features that I’d like to build into the application is how info about the trips (trip reports, pictures and movies) are shared between club members and also outside the club to show how active the club is. Currently the club has a website but is quite out of date with regards to club activities and pictures and movies are stored in social media accounts that are only accessible to certain members. The next steps will involve devising a strategy to improving this and empowering members to submit there own content.