Centralize Work Product Management/alx
| Centralize Work Product Management | |
| Contributors | Christian Köppe |
|---|---|
| Last modification | May 15, 2017 |
| Source | Köppe (2012)[1][2] |
| Pattern formats | OPR Alexandrian |
| Usability | |
| Learning domain | |
| Stakeholders | |
Working on a group assignment which includes work products often requires the exchange of these among group members. You already started to Manage the Project (Manage the Project) and did Spread Tasks Appropriately (Spread Tasks Appropriately).
If the work products are not available in the current versions to all concerned students, inconsistencies and incompleteness can occur as students might work on different versions which later have to be merged.
Unavailability. It is possible that a group member does not have access to all products which she or he needs.
Version Conflicts. If different team members work simultaneously on the same work products, then the chance of conflicting versions is high. Solving these conflicts costs extra time.
Therefore: Make all work products available via one centralized place and keep the work products up-to-date.
If this central place is available to all group members, then all members have access to all work products too. By keeping the work products up-to-date and working only with the current versions minimizes the chance of version conflicts. You should also Use A Styleguide (Use A Styleguide) to ensure that not only everything is always in the latest version, but that it is also consistent qua e.g. layout or format.
Examples of systems which you can use for managing your work products are Dropbox, SVN, or GIT.
A team had distributed the tasks that needed to be done in the team. Some members had to work on different parts of the same report, and it showed that after sending new versions throughout the group, some of the already described parts of the report were missing or in an older version. They decided to ensure that there is only one version and created a dropbox folder that was shared by everyone. This way, all team members automatically got the latest version of the report after some changes have been done to it. As result, they were able to deliver the completed report on time and including all required parts.
References
- ↑ Köppe, C. (2012). Learning patterns for group assignments: part 1. In Proceedings of the 19th Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs (PLoP 2012). The Hillside Group.
- ↑ Also mentioned in de Cortie, T., van Broeckhuijsen, R., Bosma, G., & Köppe, C. (2013). Learning patterns for group assignments: part 2. In Proceedings of the 20th Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs (PLoP 2013). The Hillside Group.