Remote teamwork can be a struggle. Coordinating meeting times, creating team structure, and planning proper objectives are just three of many challenges.
While observing your teams work, I gathered some thoughts below to help your teams become more effective during the course. Feel free to use them, leave them, or come up with your own methods to work as best as you can as a team.
Discuss Standards Early and Frequently
While some of the Kanban cards may seem best suited to ensure the final project checks all the necessary boxes for grading, it is helpful to start the dialogue about standards early. It is much harder to revise seven weeks worth of work at the end than it is to review and revise standards in small steps as your team works forward. That being said, talk with your team members, compare code, push updates and submit pull requests to your team repository often.
Writing code in R is like writing in English or any language--it will differ stylistically from person to person but the fundamentals are the same. Read each others' code so you can collectively improve.
Project Management
Project management has its own set of difficulties but also depends on open, continuous communication. Find what works best for your team so your project's organization and progression is as consistent as possible.
Each lab has several objectives and a deadline. In your teams, consider discussing how to split up tasks/objectives into smaller milestones leading up to the deadline so that each team member contributes a small piece to the collective effort and obligations are split up more clearly by dates. Efficient team planning provides people with chunks of time to focus on and prioritize their assigned work as well as practice in trusting others to perform their duties and speak up to each other when help is needed. Your teams are large enough where partner work is possible as well.
Use the kanban board for labs, the final project, and anything in between. It'll help your team splits up tasks and identify tasks that are still pending. Consider labels that will offer easy methods for filtering (e.g., Lab01, Wk02 Reviews, etc.).
Hi CPP528,
Remote teamwork can be a struggle. Coordinating meeting times, creating team structure, and planning proper objectives are just three of many challenges.
While observing your teams work, I gathered some thoughts below to help your teams become more effective during the course. Feel free to use them, leave them, or come up with your own methods to work as best as you can as a team.
Discuss Standards Early and Frequently
While some of the Kanban cards may seem best suited to ensure the final project checks all the necessary boxes for grading, it is helpful to start the dialogue about standards early. It is much harder to revise seven weeks worth of work at the end than it is to review and revise standards in small steps as your team works forward. That being said, talk with your team members, compare code, push updates and submit pull requests to your team repository often.
Writing code in R is like writing in English or any language--it will differ stylistically from person to person but the fundamentals are the same. Read each others' code so you can collectively improve.
Project Management
Project management has its own set of difficulties but also depends on open, continuous communication. Find what works best for your team so your project's organization and progression is as consistent as possible.
Each lab has several objectives and a deadline. In your teams, consider discussing how to split up tasks/objectives into smaller milestones leading up to the deadline so that each team member contributes a small piece to the collective effort and obligations are split up more clearly by dates. Efficient team planning provides people with chunks of time to focus on and prioritize their assigned work as well as practice in trusting others to perform their duties and speak up to each other when help is needed. Your teams are large enough where partner work is possible as well.
Use the kanban board for labs, the final project, and anything in between. It'll help your team splits up tasks and identify tasks that are still pending. Consider labels that will offer easy methods for filtering (e.g., Lab01, Wk02 Reviews, etc.).
Best,
@yukicruz