One of the largest issues for our team was collaboration.
When we began the year, we had a project idea that we all
knew would inevitably fail. It took us about three weeks to
figure that out, planning and even writing a little code in
the process. After that fiasco, one of our team members
presented the idea of modeling the world economy, a
slightly more possible, but still way to variable process.
However, we went with it, developing a plan and creating a
process (thanks to Neale). We began to implement this plan,
but it eventually led to the same person deviating from
the proposed plan and attempting to write the entire
project himself.
This, of course, led to failure. Two other members of the
team, throughout the entire project, were busy learning
LISP, as well as writing a preliminary version of the
Traveling Salesman Problem. After the first two projects
failed, we extended the preliminary model until it became a
full-fledged project, which turned out to be more
substantial then any other piece of code we had.
We definitely learned a lot about planning an application,
and how something like this is not a “dive right in” kind
of program. As we look back on our successes and our
failures, we can definitely “chalk it up as experience.”