ICS 125: Practical Teamwork

A good team
- Accomplishs stated goals (e.g., ships the product)
- Builds/maintains valuable professional relationships in and out of the team
- Enjoys working together, learns from each other, trusts each other
- Has complementary strengths to cover all needed areas
A good team member
- Knows his/herself: strengths, weaknesses, professional philosophy
- Truely wants the team to succeed
- Follow the golden rule to proactively shape your team experience
- Is professionally courteous, respectful, and cooperative
- Cooperative can include being available when needed, and being flexible
- Understands how his/her goals fit the team goals
- Understands his/her role: what he/she needs to do, and why
- Knows what others are doing, and why
- Is honest and forthcoming with teammates

Someone flakes out and lets the team down
- Be honest about your availability up front during planning
- Make sure that you understand what you have to do, don't get overwhelmed
- Make responsibilities and progress visible to everyone
One person does all the work
- Make sure they realize that the project is too big for one person, others need to be kept in the loop so that they can do their parts
- That person should not be "stealing" other people's tasks
The whole team is clueless about some aspect
- Assign someone to master that aspect / mitigate that risk
- Work together in a study group to all learn
Team procrastination, or unwanted job
- Make a plan and stick to it, you have no choice
- A little friendly competition for motivation
- Every person does their share of chores, that's part of being professional
Hard to schedule team meetings
- Use more email and issue tracking
- Meet during discussion section time slot
Big misunderstandings
- Slow down and make sure everyone agrees on the basics
- Listen and repeat
- Write things down as tasks or documents
- Don't just meet and then work separately, try some pair programming
- Design and code review meetings
Long critical path
- Consider parallel teamwork when you plan and design the system
- Realize when others are waiting for you, don't block their work
- Keep things simple so that other team members dont face a huge learning curve

Practice, experience, thoughfulness, personal reflection
Use tools that help keep others in the loop, track responsibiilties and progress
Capture team discussions in clear documents, or at least a message archive
Design and code review meetings
Consider parallelism in planning and design
Use coding standards to take certain stylistic issues off the table
Use external standards documents as part of requirements: precise, pre-agreed upon, unchanging