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Comments on KXA351
Describe one skill you have developed that will be useful for your future:
During this course, I have developed much better team-working skills. In
particular, I feel that I can comfortably work on a team-based software
development, and that I have a good general understanding of what this entails.
This includes such areas as team organizational skills, and close collaborative
software development. I anticipate this being extremely useful experience for
future work, both as an example that I can work in such an environment and to
give an indication of what to expect in such situations.
Describe one problem you have encountered because of teamwork:
One of the team-related problems faced was that of even work distribution.
During the semester we had difficulties at times allocating work evenly to all
team members – sometimes this was the result of people being unavailable at
certain times, or having difficulties with aspects of the development, but most
often this was because of a lack of understanding of how much work would be
involved in each of the development areas. This problem was overcome by
maintaining a flexible approach to work distribution – if an area was
discovered to be more difficult or time-consuming than anticipated, a
discussion and redistribution resolved the problem.
Advice for future students forming a team and choosing a project:
For future students of this course, I recommend choosing your project carefully.
Only choose a project that the team is interested in – trying to develop
software that you do not think is useful or you have no interest in will not
give you great results. Also try to ensure that the entire team is happy with
the project, as much as is possible. If you can find a project that looks like
something you would be interested in developing or using yourself outside of
the course, there is a much greater chance that you will enjoy the course and
will produce a good product at the end. It is also important to seriously take
into consideration the difficulty rating of the project, but balance this
against your team’s skills. A team in which all members have a strong
networking interest and skills will find a networking project much easier than
a team which has no such interest or ability, regardless of the specified
difficulty rating.
This unit provided a good learning experience because…
This unit provided a good learning experience because it created a real,
development-focused, team environment to work in. Having a development project
that much larger and fuller in scope than assignments for other units gives a
much better understanding of what a real software development process requires.
By running through the development from beginning to end, from the basics of
design through to final implementation, provides a much better experience of
developing software rather than just completing a small section of this as an
assignment. The team environment also provides a much better experience of how
to develop a software project as a whole, including integration of other
people’s components, rather than an individual development where you usually do
not have to rely on anyone else’s code or have them relying on yours.
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