Do's And Don'ts Related To Group Projects

In my 3rd academic year, I had to face a subject which was an one year software development project. The module was called as  Software Engineering Project and while doing that project I was able to experience new Do's and Don'ts regarding group projects.


1. Planing before work
Planning is an important thing in any group project. It becomes crucial in a software development project when considering about the integration of the project. Not only integration, but starting from the work allocation, there's lot of planning that has to be done in a project. So it's always a good habit to spend sometime for planning before you start the work.

2. Know your members
Referral

When it comes to a group project, there has to be team work. That means each member has to work collaborating with the other members. It's rarely two people in the world have same attitudes regarding a particular matter. They all have their own opinions, mostly based on the previous experiences in their lives. So after all team work is not so easy as it says. So each member of the team has to have a good idea about the other members of the team. That idea includes their attitudes, their capacity and theirs passions. It is a must for the group leader to have an idea about those facts. But if the other members also can have an understanding on those, it will help a lot in dealing with the other members while working. And in work allocation also, knowing the members well enough can be a great help to allocate them the work that they can perform well.

 3. Time frame and the scope

Possible or Impossible; it has to be decided at the beginning of the project. According to the user stories written, correct time allocation has to be done for those user stories. For less experienced developers it can take much more time than we anticipate. So it's always good to plan for the worst case when allocating time for certain work. If you definitely know about the subject and can be sure about the time it can consumes, then go for the exact time duration at allocation. If not always allocate sometime to be mistaken. If you finish the work before the expected time, obviously you can move to the next one; no harm done.

 4. Deadlines before deadlines
Meeting deadlines is a problem that has been been brought up for conversation even in the industry. It's so hard to meet deadline, as we fail to give our best most of the time till the last moment. That's how human mind works. So the best thing to do is, always give our mind a closer target and mislead our mind to finish the work early than it is really should. This can also help the developer in a chance of doing wrong. Still that person may have enough time to meet the real deadline. This approach reduce both risk pressure from the developer. And I think it's very good approach to be followed in group projects.


 5. Continuous communication

Each and every member have to have an idea about the work other members are doing in the group. It doesn't have to be deep and through, but what is it and how it fits to the overall. That can help in knowledge sharing and motivating other members to do their work.  When it comes to the leader of the team the leader has to have a deep idea, how each members' work fits together to evaluate if they're going in the correct path. The continuous conversation with the leader can help to motivate the other members to do their work in the best way they can.

But these are not the only things that has to be consider when working in a group project. But according to my opinion these are some key points that we cannot ignore in any case. Hope to come with new posts in the future. Cheers :)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

WPF Dispatcher - Accessing UI Thread From Another Thread

If you're a C#.NET developer creating a WPF application and it's obvious that you could come across a scenarios to use multi threading. Have you ever tried to access an element in the UI from another thread and come across an exception with the following message ? "The calling thread cannot access this object because a different thread owns it." What's the reason for such message ? It's something like this. In certain programming languages the application starts with something called the main thread or the UI thread. And usually, the elements of the UI, are created with that main thread. When another thread tries to access it, that message is given. Put into simple words, "When you're doing something to one of the UI elements, you have to do it through the UI thread." The next question is,  how to do such thing ? When you're working with WPF, every thread has an associated Dispatcher which provides
Read more

Downgrade NuGet Packages - Visual Studio

Image
I came across this problem when I was working with the SignalR WebSocket . The project was already included with the references related to SignalR 2 Server application and I wanted to add  Newtonsoft.Json  library into my project for some json serialization and de-serialization. Added it without a problem, except there was an exception from SignalR. It needed Newtonsoft version 6.0 and adding Newtonsoft again has updated that reference to 9.0 which was the latest update for Newtonsoft. So following is the solution I used for downgrade Newtonsoft.Json back to version 6.0. 1. First you should get the Package Manager Console Window. It is reachable via  "TOOLS -> Library Package Manager -> Package Manager Console" . 2. Then you have to uninstall the current version of the library you want to downgrade, by executing the following command in the Package Manager Console. It's very important you use the -Force  flag, if there are dependencies to the package you&#
Read more

Callbacks With Interfaces Or Delegates

I'll start like this by directly jumping into a scenario. You have this one class, which has many methods called by different other classes. For the moment let's not think about those many methods and who calls those. Focusing on the the matter in hand the requirement is such, that you have to call a method in some other class, which will consume some time for execution. So that method runs that execution in a background thread inside, and only he knows when it finishes. In this scenario you have to give them something to call, may be some reference or some callback method, after the execution of the background thread is done. What I'm going to discuss now is the ways to do it. Delegates First I'll take you on the C#.NET road. In C# there is a very simple and straight forward way to do this, thanks to " Delegates ", which are reference points to the methods. In simple words, in a delegate you can put a method in there,
Read more