It's Hard Managing 8 People
09 May 2024
This past semester has been an important lesson in group work. I had good expectations going into the second phase of the Software Engineering course thinking it would be another journey down a peaceful road. One of the main problems that I encountered very early on was the difficulty in managing, and communicating and working with 7 other programmers. Another factor that was not present during the first portion of this course was an actual client that we had monthly meetings with. Both of these factors resulted in a rather interesting yet stressful semester.
Team Dynamics
To mimic working together in a team in a real life setting, team members were selected and put together through a randomizer. Although that may have allowed us to experience how it’s done in real life, I feel like it resulted in bad team dynamics for many of the teams that were made this semester. Personally, my team only had half the members consistently contribute to the project, while the rest slacked off for majority of the semester. Early on, those team members were pinged or talked to on discord about their lack of contributions. However as time went on, they simply stopped responding and people gave up trying to have them contribute. The class does do a good job of allowing us to distribute points fairly during every single milestone, as GitHub contributions and those surveys are worth majority of our grade in the class. As the semester went on, it became apparent that almost all the groups had some slackers as the progression on the project itself starts to slow down a month into the semester. Outside of those team members that did not contribute to the project, I had quite a good time talking with the members that actually showed up. We talked about different implementations on certain features that the client had requested, taking into account both UI and UX aspects.
Real Client
As mentioned above, ICS414 gave us an actual client that we had meetings with as they critique and evaluate our work each month. In my opinion, this was the best thing that I got out of taking this class. The client was extremely helpful in directing the overall direction she wanted the project to head in. Having a client also put me under some amount of pressure and stress, motivating me to work on the issues and making sure the work done is presentable. After each meeting, we would get valuable feedback from a perspective that we may not have thought about. As a result, our work and overall project was more fleshed out, as more thought gets put into them from various different perspectives.
Real Life Application
As the semester went on, I slowly started to get more and more annoyed at the team members who had been slacking off since the start of the semester. It wasn’t until almost the end of the semester, after I had a talk with other friends that I started to care less about the overall experience of the class. They said that this is what a realistic experience will be like as you move into the work force and start working with others. It is not realistic to think that you’ll always be able to pick your team members, or even which team you get place into. It is not realistic to have team members who are as motivated as you are, and are willing to put in the same amount of effort as you are. Most of the time, people will just be there to do the minimum, but as long as you try to contribute, that’s that all matters. The other’s performance and contribution isn’t something that you can control, so just don’t stress it.