ICS 499: It’s not easy being King

For this past week on the Devcathlon journey to success, I was recently appointed leader of the class. Being the leader of the class project is never easy; I was recently the leader for Team MS, which consisted of 4 members including me. Now as the class leader I will be over seeing 7 other people.

Delegating the work

From leading 3 members to 7 members was a real hard job; at first I took it as a good opportunity to step up, and I had planned what and where everyone will be working on. I distributed the tasks and got approvals from the two team leaders, Anthony and Daniel; also everyone acknowledge what they were to do. Since Anthony’s team was mostly finished with they’re part of the system, I decided to pair a member of Anthony’s team with a member in Daniel’s team. So with everyone having a task to complete and everyone teaming with each other, I thought things would get finished faster.

Issues

During the week some issues occurred, mainly the lack of communication. One part was due to a member of the class rewriting parts of a file, which another people were working or dependent on. This cause a lot of conflictions when uploading files that has been worked on into the repository. I tried to solve this dilemma by sending out an email to the class saying, “If you are going to rewrite someone else’s file, please notify that person”, in efforts to have better communication between members. Some people actually followed what the email said to do and some didn’t.

Another problem that happened was when a person broke the Continuous Integration build, that person at times would not fix it right away. The Continuous Integration is like our traffic light; unless that light is green the project can not move along, and if it’s red everyone slows down or stops until it is green again. The last problem that occurred in my first week as the leader was people taking to long on accomplishing something. When I assigned the tasks for members to do, I also assigned an expected time for that task to be accomplished. For things that should only take one night of work, it ended up taking 2 – 3 nights of work. I tried to stay on their backs asking, “When will it be done?” and “We need your stuff working now”. Eventually they got their task done, but behind schedule.

Conclusion

My reign as the leader has been a tough week; not only do I have to worry about my tasks to do, but worry about others finishing their parts as well. I also learned from this past week experience that the team should communicate better, and I highly recommend pair programming; because you have an extra pair of eyes to help you and it’s always good to get a fresh perspective. As the leader one thing I was open to do, was to listen to everyone’s frustrations towards other members in the class. Listening to other’s inputs about other members helps me see who would be best paired up together and what should a person do in the project. The hardest parts for me though, is maintaining a neutral aspect towards everyone in the class; Wow its not easy being the King……