Reflections about my role in the team (as team leader):
Organizing the group
is a lot of work. Making sure we communicate with each other, making sure
everyone has something appropriate to do and that they are capable and
comfortable doing, is also time consuming and not always easy. Also keeping
everyone updated on what is happening right now, what we need to do, and
hinting that we should decide a date for the next meeting (and having the final
say kind of) is also time consuming and not that easy.
Additionally it
takes time to always have in mind what the next steps should be, thinking of
the bigger picture and the time constraints, meaning that I had thought I would
have more time to code etc then I did end up having.
But I learned from
working with people that I haven't worked with before, also very different kind
of people form each other and from people I usually work with.
Setting ourselves an
earlier deadline was probably good, even though we did not manage to finish by
then. It made sure we pushed ourselves and the project a little earlier, which
enabled us to have less things to fix the last week. However, there was still a
lot to do the last week.
We managed pretty
well in the end, but it wasn't a walk in the park exactly.
At the beginning we
were pretty good at meeting etc. Towards the end, always someone or more than one missing when we met.
Problematic.
Most of the GDD was
in the end written by only a few group members.
That wasn't the plan
and I tried to push writing the GDD earlier, and poking people to remind them,
but that strategy wasn't very successful. It worked sometimes.
Needed to really
insist to get any feedback on what we had written in the GDD from those who
hadn't written much in it.
I guess, since it's
the end of the project, sometimes you get a little tired of your group members.
Also we all had other courses in paralell with similar deadlines and needing
project work time. However, I've felt in earlier projects, and that was confirmed
again in this project, that simply communicating through messages doesn't work.
We get so much more done and understand each other so much better when we meet
in person, so I'm a little sad that we weren't as good at that in the end.
Reflections about the project work:
We didn't have any
exactly defined roles, except mine as team leader, but looking back we worked
with different things and there was some kind of informal division. This meant
that most of us coded some at some point in the project, even if others wrote the
most of the code.
The code is
obviously a central part of the final product, however I learned how important
and how much the documentation, the Business Plan planing, the Target Group
planning etc is too.
I wrote about the
Business Plan and the Target Group and such in the GDD, however I found a lot
of support in the group when we planned those parts before writing them in the
GDD. It was very good to have discussions about them, and get feedback from the
rest of the course students, so that we knew what parts we might need to
explain more. The presentations were also a great tool, because a lot of our
discussions were because we were to present our ideas, so that could also be
used to base the GDD on.
Reflections about other projects and course:
During the final
demo it was very interesting to see what other groups had done, and how
different they all were from each other. It was also interesting that you could
see that the groups put different amount of focus on different parts, and there
final product was shaped thereafter.
Some projects I
really enjoyed hearing about was the AR pirate game and the Beat game.
KamiClones
