You will learn as you go, so stop procrastinating and start.
I’ve found that teams either start building too soon, or take too long to start.
Starting too soon without some planning is a mistake. These teams often focus on one aspect, and rush that through without thinking about how it will connect to other components. They also tend to overlook other potential solutions, as they ‘see’ an answer immediately.
Taking too long to start has other problems. This is often called ‘tutorial purgatory’ by students: they keep doing ‘one more tutorial’ before starting on the work for their solution. They keep hoping to find a tutorial that is ‘almost’ a solution, instead of parts of solution.
You should aim for something in between these two extremes. Do ‘just enough’ thinking before you start.
Build to learn. Learn to build
Yes, do a little planning to find the risky parts, and where you’re unsure of what to do. Then start to put the parts together to build the whole. Focus on learning, and reducing risk. Build it in thin vertical strips that keep growing the product.
Given you’re starting, you will not know as much as you want to know. You will also learn much more as you put the pieces together. Not knowing everything shouldn’t stop you from starting. Starting the work starts the learning process.
Yes, you will make mistakes. That’s part of learning. It doesn’t matter. You can roll-back your code, or refactor parts as required. This is normal.
By starting you also learn more about what you don’t know. You can use this in discussion with your stakeholders, and potential customers, or people who’ll use your product. This means you can gather feedback to improve what you’re doing.
Teach your people to do just enough to start
Show people how a bit of forward thinking will help them plan their approach to the build. And guide them in an exercise, perhaps that illustrates how they might plan their work. I like to use a pizza store for this. They also don’t need to estimate the work either.
Do encourage them to start before they feel ready. This feeling will help guide them too: it will help them to slow down, and not rush their work. Instead, if anything, they should feel curious to see what might happen, or how something will fit together. As noted, they will learn as they build.
This post is part of a project pulling together my materials and ideas about Teaching Team Collaboration: the Human-Side of Software Development for software development to students.
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The ideas above are from my book 101+ Ideas to Improve Team Collaboration, which covers all of these little things that students can do to improve their collaboration. Also available via Kindle.