Final Thoughts

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