My experience of working on a coding team.
Recently, I was involved in a project in which we had to develop a website for university students who where trying to find a place where to live. Throughout my life, I had never been so involved in a coding project like this and that is why I would like to share what I learned about working on a team.
First, any project that you face in your life will always come with difficulties. Some of them bigger than others, but the key to success in every working situation is teamwork. The term ¨team work¨ can be defined as a group of people with various complementary skills, working together towards a common vision.
When coding our website, we faced a lot of problems. First of all, not one member of the team knew anything about HTML and CSS. The solution was simple: “study”, we actually came across a really good courses on Udemy and on SoloLearn that gave us enough material to create our website. Other problems we dealt with was organizing the team. We where actually not used to work on collaborative teams and, at first, every member of the team was working kind of isolated, elaborating their own pieces of code that didn´t really sum up with the ideas that other members had developed. Then, while starting to code the website we divided the chores, but later on we noticed every person was doing a totally different website, with different designs, fonts, functionalities and more. It was a complete disaster! Here we realized that problems cannot be solved by one person only; instead, it depends on the skills that each person has and how they complement others work while placed together in a teamwork. This is the best, fastest and most intelligent way to approach a complicated situation.
That’s why we tried to adapt a Scrum methodology to our team. We divided ourselves in development teams and selected a scrum master for each chore and decided the best way to complete the website was by working together. We came up with a sketch of the main ideas we wanted to develop for our website, then created a prototype we all tested and then started iterating on small but significant changes that everybody had agreed on,
We also later noticed that, for a team to be successful, some criteria needs to be taken into consideration for example, the working space needs to make everyone comfortable, there has to be no distractions and everybody should have physical and mental freedom that lets them work as they like. At first, we had a lot of meetings to work together on campus or a café, but then we noticed that that there is no better place to work that on one’s own home. The problem was how to work remotely on a team without seeing each other so often. Here was when the use of GitHub and Slack came handy. Some weeks before one of our professors had teched us how to use GitHub, so we adapt it to our project. This was the best way of working all together on the same code, without having the troubles of elaborating different pieces of a puzzle that couldn’t come up together. GitHub came in useful on organizing the team due to the backlog we elaborated on it and on maintaining the code together and working, due to the merge conflicts tools. And Slack and WhatsApp groups where really useful to communicate. We then realized communication is the main tool to successfully do anything!
Also, as a developer or any team member we realized one of the first skills you need to have when working is patience. First, you need to understand that everybody has different skills and working paces, so the key is to help each other and appreciate everyone’s work. Also, as a developer you need to understand that not all code is correct. Sometimes, even after long hours of working over a code on, maybe, a sheet of a website or a functionality, in the end the code may be not correct or it is not what users would expect of it, so you have to leave behind that emotional attachment created after all the hours of work and accept that the code needs to be changed or maybe eliminated. This was a hard learning that we all had to accept and, in the end, made us grow as developers and team members. The most important learning is to accept that you are not always right.
Respect was also an important value that needs to be kept by everyone on the team. With this in mind, you can argue with your peers’ ideas until you find common ground to work on, but any disrespectful action should be dismissed. Healthy communication and constructive criticism are both great tools for teamwork. Here communication comes handy because when brainstorming and talking about the project and new ideas, everyone on the team gets to see the problems from different perspectives and decide having all the ideas on the table, considering everyone’s vote as important.
Finally, we learned that teamwork involves more than having each person working on a piece of code separately by himself and that’s why all the ideas mentioned before have to be considered. In the end this experience helped me grow as a developers and human being.
I leave you the link to our final deployment, hope you like it.