Over the last two weeks, we have been working on a group project that simulates how global software development can look like. Most of us are online students so this creates an interesting experience since we never met each other.
The project is divided into two parts, Part A Planning and Part B Unit testing + Reporting. Both phases are essential in a successful project.
Part A:
Create an environment for this project
Investigate and understand the project code
Understand the unit test suite
Planning
Part B:
Writing Unit Tests
Version Controlling
Writing Tasks
At the beginning, communication within the team was almost nonexistent until right before the Part A deadline. We eventually held some Teams calls for planning, but many of us were still unsure about the project requirements and what exactly we were supposed to build. We did have a team lead who assigned additional responsibilities, but the overall the directions still felt unclear.
Personally, I faced several challenges throughout this project. I’m new to GitHub (which I openly mentioned to my team), but despite asking questions, it didn’t always feel like others fully understood the project either at least from what I gathered. The lack of communication and the last minute meetings were very unfamiliar to me and caused me unwanted stress.
In my day-to-day work life, I am typically the team leader, working with different groups regularly. Because of that, I value communication and believe it is essential for effective teamwork, clarity, and confidence. This project felt very different from what I’m used to, and it made the entire experience more difficult than expected. I’m hoping the next two group projects run more smoothly and that this was just a fluke start due to it being our first collaboration project for this course.
Another major challenge I faced involved GitHub. Since I’m a new user, I initially thought I was on the correct branch but I misunderstood what our team lead meant when he said each person needed their own “directory.” I assumed he meant a folder within the working branch, not a separate cloned branch named after each team member. This misunderstanding cost me almost two full days, as I kept thinking the issue was with my code. It didn’t help that other teammates had also created folders in the main(duplicate) branch, which made me believe my approach was correct.
Despite the confusion and frustration, I’m relieved that the project is over and even more relieved that my unit tests worked correctly the entire time.
Project 1 Reflection summary:
"The team did a fantastic job! I’m glad we all worked well together to get everything figured out for a seamless delivery. The challenges I faced with this project was mostly related to navigating github with all the branches and to make sure I had the correct clones and making it work with my local environment. I also had an issue with testing using Gradle, as the configurations didn’t seem to match my current IntelliJ environment setup."
Full disclosure: This post reflects my personal option and experience/observation, and no one should take it personally or be offended but instead look at it as a learning experience.
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