Programming in Teams

[rysin]

Hey everyone, Ive got a question about team programming. My teacher for Computer Science gave us our first team project last week. The goal was to create a program that calculated how long it took a ball to hit the ground given a certain height. Me and my group failed pretty badly. We each sat down at a computer and wrote the program throwing advice and ideas at eachother as we went. When one of my group mates got a program up and running we sent it in to be graded. Im really hoping that the way we went about this isnt the best way, because it was very painful and time consuming, and I was wondering how teams go about programming. Thanks.

[BestJewSinceJC]

[In general you would go through one of many software development processes, depending on what company or organization you work for.] For your project, however, you could have simply had a meeting with your team and determined the essential aspects of your project. Then, once you had the essential "functions" into place, you could each go work on one, which would lead to finishing more quickly than if everyone on your team is doing the same project separately. For example, you could be working on the part of your program that prompts the user to input a height and reads in that height. Your friend could be working on calculating the final answer given the height.

[rysin]

Yea that would work. Then we could just get a flash drive and paste it all together.We could all work on different functions and then have one guy work on the actual program using the functions that weve made. See were originally gonna do something like that without functions but then nobody knew which variables everyone else was using and it was a big mess. Thanks for the reply.

[BestJewSinceJC]

If you split the project into who writes what function, the variables is a trivial matter. But again, the project is so small anyway, I don't see how you could split it into more than three parts -- getting the user's input and calculating the answer and printing the output. And even that is really a stretch. And another note - on a real project, you use a code management system such as CVS or SVN where everyone can share code, but without working on the same code at once or interfering with each other.

[Rashakil Fol]

And another note - on a real project, you use a code management system such as CVS or SVN where everyone can share code, but without working on the same code at once or interfering with each other.

Never use CVS. Don't even mention CVS. Usually, don't use SVN either; it's easier to setup something like git or hg and they're better in most ways, but it depends.

[ithelp]

You need to break the project into individual tasks and assign the tasks to individual members of the team and integrate modules developed by various team members and deliver.

[BestJewSinceJC]

Never use CVS. Don't even mention CVS. Usually, don't use SVN either; it's easier to setup something like git or hg and they're better in most ways, but it depends.

SVN I liked pretty well, but I agree with CVS. We were forced to use it for school one semester, and I used it without problems. The next semester, I helped a friend use it who didn't understand it. I locked him out of his own repository, giving an error that I couldn't resolve. It basically said another user had locked the resources, yet it was a one person project. . so there was nobody else who could lock the resources. Turns out a lot of his classmates experienced the same error and the professors just granted extensions.

[Rashakil Fol]

SVN I liked pretty well, but I agree with CVS. We were forced to use it for school one semester, and I used it without problems. The next semester, I helped a friend use it who didn't understand it. I locked him out of his own repository, giving an error that I couldn't resolve. It basically said another user had locked the resources, yet it was a one person project. . so there was nobody else who could lock the resources. Turns out a lot of his classmates experienced the same error and the professors just granted extensions.

I've found git and hg to be much easier to use than svn. Certainly for personal use they're very easy -- you don't have to setup an svn server anywhere. Then it's easy to add other people, because... you don't have to setup an svn server anywhere. And you don't have to worry about being connected to the internet all the time, which for somebody like me is useful. SVN is still better if you only want to give people access to a particular subfolder of your source code or if you're dealing with large binary files. And yeah, CVS is basically crap, that's the reason SVN got invented.

[JuliaAdam]

thanks for this useful and informative topic. i like this discussion. thanks for this.