Meet as frequently as you need to based on your deadlines.
Each software engineering project is unique. The team is a collection of individuals, who might coordinate, or collaborate to achieve their goals. Even when this is a student assignment, and all teams have the same deadline, each team is still unique, and should find its own way to work together.
As there is no ‘one pattern’ to suit all teams, each team needs to experiment, and try a few options to find their preferred way of working as a team. Some teams might find that meeting in the mornings is better, due to other commitments in the afternoons, or evenings. It could be that child care commitments, mean a team member needs to bring their son/daughter too sometimes for part of a meeting.
Each team is unique, but shares some similarities. This means most issues might be new to the team, but not to course organisers, or coaches, who might be able to suggest solutions, or guide teams in finding potential solutions.
Find a cadence, or rhythm for the work
Part of the solution will be setting up a rhythm of work for the team so that the goal is successfully achieved. Using scrum or xp suggests time boxes of work to break the work into incremental iterations. This is one rhythm of the work.
Within each time box the team should set up another rhythm, or cadence of work too. This provides a regularity, and way of working that helps guide the team.
The time boxes will be shorter, or longer depending upon the time available until the final version is due. If this is a coursework, then it might be twelve weeks until the final is due. If a commercial piece of work, then the deadline might be a trade show, or funding deadline.
Set the time boxes accordingly to provide a suitable number of iterations for their feedback loops. Within the time box, planning meetings, and working meetings – where pairs, or the team collaborate together – should also be scheduled accordingly. Use calendar tools to populate these into people’s calendars so they’re not forgotten.
By scheduling the work and meetings it’s easier for team members to organise their other commitments. Because the times and dates are in their calendar, they shouldn’t double-book themselves either. This makes it easier to remember and to participate.
In the image, each step could be a time box, and each hole in a step, the other meetings. Together they form a whole, and have their own cadence.
Guide your people to set a cadence
Have team members share their schedules and commitments. The more honest they are at the start, the easier it is to find solutions. Remind them to use calendars and meeting invites too.
Have them review their time box meetings after the first one finishes. Remind them these should be adjusted, modified to suit their needs.
Lastly, remind them that these meetings are both for decision making, and also to do the work of pairs and when they work as a mob or ensemble too. The goal being to finish each time box that bit closer to finishing the whole before the deadline.
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.