Our team meetings should have been status meetings, but they ended up being problem solving meetings. The meetings solved problems for individuals but the team made no progress.
Our group's meetings were too informal to get work done quickly and efficiently.
Without a formal meeting format, everything is just thrown together without any order and that causes some confusion.
Even if you're not working directly on a part of the project you still need to have somewhat of an idea what is going on there.
We made the mistake of only allowing two members to create the design. After the design was complete the rest of the team had no idea how all the pieces fit together. Thus the designers had to "hold the hand" of the rest of the team members through the rest of the design process. This wasted many hours ...
Our teams biggest mistake was not having everyone involved with all aspects of the project.
It's important to directly involve each group member with the design process.
I made an assumption that my teammates had the same vision (for the design) as I did, when it fact there were differences of ideas..When we finally compiled the design we had to make changes to our individual pieces in order to make them work together.
Often people did not clearly understand what they were responsible for and when it was due.
We would be assigned action items, and when not sure how to accomplish them, we would wait until the next meeting to address our problems. This would set us back two days.
Our group members did not ask for clarification on enough details (of the design) to let us start work on methods.
Because I did not clarify some of the action items when they were assigned to me, the mistakes I made were magnified when I brought back somethings I had worked on and discovered that I had not done them properly.
I didn't foresee the questions that I would have for people about things they created in the user interface. Then when I was working on my tasks, I couldn't ask questions because it was too late at night to call. I realized that there could be no procratinating when working on these projects -- you have to rely on others and they're relying on you.
Group members were originally content to do only what their job title entailed. Because of this attitude they lost sight of the big picture.
People lacked the motivation to check into what they were supposed to be doing and do it. They waited for tasks to be assigned to them.
Group members would miss group work sessions because they were out of town or some other excuse. These people couldn't do subsequent work because they were out of the loop and didn't have the "big picture" of our project.
We let all the problems lie dormant and sometimes let them come out in rude comments or something like that. What I have taken from this is that groups need to talk a lot more about what is going on and how they feel about certain things.
A mistake I made was waiting until the first programming assignment was due to try and learn the Java programming language. I realize now that I should have started as soon as the quarter started.
In most classes I'm able to make it through by skimming the material and doing what makes the most sense in the assignments, but I missed quite a bit doing the same for this project.
Now I know that I should learn how to use the software tool on a trivial assignment before using it to complete something important.
We underestimated the considerable amount of time to integrate the work each individual completed.
Until now, I thought the most complex part of creating software was doing the actual coding; however, I now realize that this is the simplest part of creating software. I was completely unaware of the analysis and design phase.
Our biggest problem was poor version control.
I learned that in teamwork a clear line of communication and organized structure have to be established in order for the team to be successful.
The most significant error I made during this course was underestimating the high level of attention to detail that was needed in every aspect of the project.... I don't think that I've ever done anything for a class where getting it 100% right the first time was so important.
It's just not worth it to invest so much time in using fancy tools to make fancy looking things. Low-tech solutions can work just as well (if not better) and cost a lot less to implement too.
Warning signs: