Solar Decathlon Project: Working in Groups

Overview
For this project we were given the task to design a mockup user interface for the home management system of Team Hawaii's Solar Decathlon house. As a group, Noah Wooden, Kevin Leong, and I decided on which features we thought the home management system should implement and got to work on putting together a initial mockup to present to Team Hawaii. We collaborated using the issues system provided by Google project hosting.

Working in Groups
Working in groups for this project, was a fun and useful experience. Being assigned groups for this project gave us the chance to get to know each other a little better and I would also say that working in groups significantly sped up the design process. All we had to do was come to an agreement about who would work on each section.

Our group had four meetings:

• First Meeting: Introduce ourselves to each other, exchanged contact information, and outlined a very broad strategy on how we would approach the project.
• Second Meeting: Talked on the phone, examined each of our initial designs and picked what we liked from each, divvied up who would handle designing each page.
• Third Meeting: Met in class, briefly showed each other what we had been working on, made suggestions for changes on each other's pages.
• Fourth Meeting: Physically met with each other, hammered out each of the pages that we were suppose to design while getting feed back from each other. Meeting lasted about eight hours.

In my opinion the most useful meeting was probably the fourth, because we actually got to sit down with each other and give one to one feedback on each of the pages we were designing. That's not to say that the initial meetings were useless, as the second meeting was actually quite productive in the sense that we were able to decide on what features we liked and divided up the work between the three of us. The only thing I would change about our meeting process in the future, would be to split the fourth meeting into two meetings as it took quite some time.

Issue Driven Project Management
As mentioned above, we used Google project hosting's issues system to assign tasks to each of our group members. A screen shot of the issues system can be seen below:

I would say there were advantages and disadvantages to using the system. Using the issues system was definitely helpful for assigning specific tasks for each group member when we couldn't physically meet; this basically made each of us responsible for a task that we agreed to finish by a certain date. When we didn't physically meet this definitely helped speed up the design process, but when we did meet I would say that using the issues system slowed us down a bit. When we physically met we would vocally assign a page to each person as opposed to using the issues system. Even though we still assigned pages for each person to work on, I feel that we worked more as a group on each of our pages (e.g. giving each other feedback and tips). As a result, the issues system more of a hassle because we had to assign a task to each person when we were really working as a whole. When we met, I felt like we were just assigning issues because we had to and not because it was useful. In conclusion I would say that using the issues system was definitely advantageous when working separately, but when physically meeting it was more of a setback.