In every culture, team or organization, the
problem of not being able to understand one another arises from the fact that
two individuals in the process of communication tends to misunderstand one
another due to their different perspectives on an issue. This problem is
considered detrimental to any project team as it will cause the team members to
deviate from their original purposes.
As such, it has been three weeks since our team's
first meeting for the CS2103T Project. During these three weeks, our team had
many meetings that were often had long debates on a certain issue. For example,
the desktop utility that we are supposed to develop that is be able help an NUS
student manage and track the various planning and execution processes when they
organize an event. Therefore, the utility must be able to save all the events
organized by a student and the changes made to any event plans. In order to
realize this, our team had decided to use the concept of object serialization
that is able to store the state of the various objects created when the utility
is closed. Initially, I thought that everyone in the team knew the true intent
of this concept. However, during one point of the discussion on this concept, I
realized that I could not seem to understand what both Zhang Xi and Qin Chuan
were trying to explain to me.
In such a situation, I kept trying to re-explain
my idea of using object serialization but the issue still remained stagnant and
that made all three of us even more confused. After much discussion, we finally
understood why we had problems understanding each other. This problem was
basically the different perspectives all three of us had about the use of
object serialization. Both Qin Chuan and Zhang Xi thought that whenever a user of the utility makes changes to their data, we would need use the idea of object serialization to save the changes immediately, however that's not the case as we would only need to do so once the application has been closed.
This experience has led me to ponder on whether did we try to synchronize on our idea or concept of using object serialization for the implementation of this utility. Evidently, we have not and I think in future discussions or meetings, we should do our best to make sure that our thoughts and perspectives are not interpreted differently among one another. Also, we should also bear in mind that no matter how long each debate may take, we should always ask ourselves what is our purpose here and how can we achieve the ultimate goals of this project.
In conclusion, I feel that in a team every team member should be able to synchronize their thoughts and ideas so that the smooth implementation of the project can be achieved. Having said so, I really do hope all three of us will be able to avoid such situations in the future and continue to reach our goal of completing this project with a great satisfaction.
