Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow...
Since it's already time again for a new post and I have currently nothing interesting at hand, I'd like to just let you know that now it's the first day in this winter where water in its frozen aggregate state is falling from above (formulated that way to justify that I've been called 'nerd' quite often in the past few days :P)
In other news, the first iteration of our project for the university has now passed and from my perspective it went extremely well. The teams performed quite good, there haven't been any notable problems and in the end all our goals for this iteration have been met. For the upcoming iteration our lecturer already announced that he wants to distribute the work differently to enforce more conflicts between the teams as he already intended for this first iteration.
But I think our approach to keep the teams in their own "area" at the beginning to let them get comfortable with the development environment, the development style and organization of the project is better for us. That way the less experienced learn how a project can run if there aren't any large obstacles to overcome and aren't demotivated too early in the project. Later on, when they're already up to speed with the development they can be faced with other new aspects of project work like conflicting changes and more intense synchronization between the teams.