This past week was probably the first of many hectic weeks to come throughout this capstone process. A main proponent of this week’s pressure is that my team is challenging the Initial Concepts stage this week. However, through this stress I've learned some vital things about our team dynamic, tactics to use going forward, and a better sense of scale.

One thing that I got a good look at this week was how my team members prioritize their weekly tasks.Specifically I noticed a pattern in regards to the documentation that's required for challenging the stage.All of us completed the requirements at different times, with some not completed even the day before the submit date.While this doesn’t pose a large problem now there is a great possibility that it may affect challenging into the future.To help alleviate this I'm going to talk with the team about a standard scrum practice: higher items on the backlog are higher priority.Previously we've just been making the tasks but in order for this issue not to crop up at a more important time I feel this issue needs to be addressed now.

Along the lines of communication I have noticed practices and habits that I've been doing which need to be shifted, added, or removed.Last week I realized that I needed to write more meeting notes for proper documentation and remembrance for future meetings.This is something I started doing much more regularly but also found that the team wouldn’t be able to see them.My team actually helped me to remedy this by creating a Discord channel where I can post all the meeting notes.This helps us in a lot of ways in regards to organization and communication.

For me it helps to get into the habit of doing it more regularly while communicating to me if we met the agenda laid out before.For the team it provides them a place of reference on topics discuss, decisions made, and important things to remember.Finally I think the key thing about this is that I posted it directly in the service we use to communicate.Here everyone can find it much more easily since it is something they regularly have open.

I will be interested to see how these habits develop over the course of this upcoming week and how they affect our team dynamic.A MUCH shorter blog post this week than previously. I want to change a little how I use this blog.Instead of trying to focus on each individual task I've done the past week I want to reflect on the big picture and write down main takeaways.Some weeks will be longer than others but I feel this method will allow me to better reflect, especially later on in the semester.

Thank you for reading.