UH Stego
About UH Stego
UH students commonly send text messages to communicate, but sometimes SMS or instant chat is not secure enough. Truly sensitive data should be transported or hidden to ensure that it is not left exposed to nosey third parties. Our application allows students hide sensitive text messages or images steganographically. These doctored images can be used a transport media to deliver messages without raising any suspicion or attracting unwanted attention. Once in the hands of the proper recipient, the hidden message can be extracted.
Development
During the development of UH Stego, my team and I used Issue Driven Project Management. This allowed the even division of tasks during development, in the form of “issues”. These issues spanned the scope of being minor bug fixes to feature implementations While UH Stego was being built, we planned out milestones as a mechanism to stay on task and meet deadlines. We planned our milestones to incorporate mockups, feature implementations, then overall touching up and deployment of the application to Galaxy.
I took on the development of the profiles of the project. Profiles allow users to create a contact for themselves in the user directory, so that others can send them their steganographically hidden messages. I worked on both the front and back end of the profiles, by creating the profile page, the profile edit page, and user directory. Kurt Nikaitani and Connor Slike also assisted in the development of the profiles. Additionally, I was also involved with project management by consistently updating the UH Stego page, and managing issues and milestones.
My Experience
On the technical side of development, I learned a lot about JavaScript and MongoDB. The creation of UH Stego required me to do a good amount of research in order to implement features properly. There were a lot of moans and groans within our group, due to our unfamiliarity with JavaScript and Mongo, but once we started grasping the language we were able to breeze through them.
In the non-technical aspect, I learned that in order for a project to be successful there has to be some sort of leadership. Since my groupmembers and I are familiar with one another, we found it unnecessary for any one of us to assume a leadership role. However, this ended up with final features not being decided, or errors and conflicts occurring during or after a merge. In the future, I’d like to showcase better project management leadership skills in order to create a more stellar application.
You can learn more at: UH Stego.
You can also visit my team members’s portfolios: