One of the biggest issues my group faced with productivity was time management. Whether it was from procrastination or not was irrelevant. Often times, my group could not meet all together, do to conflicting schedules, jobs, or other prior commitments. This already creates an enormous burden on all members of the group to actively communicate and work remotely. Some times, like weekends seemed like perfect times to meet, but do to interviews or family events, we were unable to even have two of the three members appear. And even though remote working or using Google Hangouts or Skype is an option, many critical times were also when exam weeks or large project due dates were. This issue is more self caused than inherent in a project like this, but it still is a common issue that plagues groups in academia and the professional world.
The other big issue my group faced was poor delegation. This had several causes, the most notable being meeting rarely to discuss responsibilities. Another cause was an initial unclear distribution of tasks and an unknown distribution of skills. While not knowing something is not normally an issue, the real problem is the time it takes to become proficient. Choosing some frameworks, react and node, over others seemed like a good idea initially, however, there is a learning curve with these that prevents people from working on them until they are ready, which can be pretty long. Additionally, no member had experience networking mobile and desktop together in one unit, as well as live data streaming, be it sensor or anything else. Latency was an issue that was decently ignored since it has never been an issue faced by the group. Server ownership was both a blessing and a curse; a blessing in that no money was required, but a curse in that only one member has complete ownership, causing delegation and separation of work issues. Aside from its network and hardware limitations, the member (myself) who has the passwords and admin privileges must be present at all demonstrations and testings. This can easily be remedied by sharing the information, however there are security issues and concerns that arise from giving passwords to a server with not too much security added to it, since it is purely for development, not commercial. Using a service like AWS would also solve, but no group member has experience with it or was willing to pay for it.
Both of these issues immensely stymied the creative process of the project. While there were minor roadblocks along the way, such as creative differences and technical limitations, these both were manageable through communicating and planning. Better organization, or a more clear division of responsibilities as well as better knowing our limitations would have greatly increased our creative potential as well as output. That being said, I am quite satisfied with the progress my group made and can only wonder what would happen if we had none of the listed issues. For future projects, it isn’t necessarily a matter of when it is started but rather how well the group meshes and works more as a unit than disjointed members.