This summer semester has definitely been an interesting one. The effects of Covid-19 have affected everything from study locations to gym routines. However, one particular activity that remained constant in my life is studying for classes. Taking Capstone over the summer proved to be an interesting experience as I learned to expand upon my technical skills and team building skills as well.
Initially, I came in with the idea that working with a team would be relatively easy as I worked very well with CS teams before. As I became more involved with my Capstone project, I noticed that not everyone resonates at the same mental frequency nor have the same work ethic. When working with a team, you are working with individuals with complex, differentiated personalities that may not necessarily mesh well. This is a lesson I learned particularly from my capstone team.
There are many different types of mentalities on a team that share different perspectives. On my team, we had a mixture of members who were capable of finding work independently and those who preferred to be assigned work. Initially, it was challenging to understand my team mates as one of our deficiencies was a lack in communication. Without communicating properly to each other, a few of us would find work and complete the tasks, while the others chose to wait until they were assigned a task. This significantly slowed down the process as there was a lack of cohesion within our team work. The fragmented process of having a few members work, while having others wait for work proved to be ineffective as we were forced to spend more time then required to develop the simulated hospital world.
In response to this challenge, the team and I decided to engage in analyzing the quality of the product increments, the amount of time spent working on each increment within a sprint, and the amount of work each team member contributed to the project. Through this solution, we were able to pinpoint the uneven distribution of work and discovered that our biggest issue was communicating how the work should be distributed. With this analysis in mind, we were able to ask each other what our strengths are and how can we each contribute to the project. From there, we were able to assign tasks respectively to each team member. The key lesson learned from this experience is to always communicate with the team from the very beginning and get to know the strengths earlier on. This will help team leaders and project managers figure out how to distribute work effectively.
As a result of my team's resilience and hard work when facing adversity, we were able to successfully implement the simulation phase of our capstone project. Below is the link to the video of the first phase of our project. Feel free to watch it and let me know your thoughts!
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