One purpose of college is to learn about life. Most of the work that you do in your life, and in this course, will be in teams. Conflicts among team members are a fact of life. Good strategies for avoiding and coping with these conflicts are crucial to your success in this course, and in life.
Team strategies. With the Nachos projects, some strategies are better than others for coordinating the activities of your team. A common error is to attempt a superficial division of the lab requirements among the team members, with each member responsible for fulfilling specific requirements. This might work in the first few labs, but teams often suffer painful losses of points for the mistakes of individual team members. In the later labs, the various requirements are so intertwined that you cannot reasonably divide the work until you understand all of the pieces of your system and how they fit together. You should meet as a group to work out a solid high-level design, before you partition the work and before you start coding. If you take the time to do this phase well, then your group will have a more effective and equitable division of labor, you will spend much less time (re)writing and (re)debugging code, you will learn more, and we will all be happier with the result.
Slackers, dictators, and irreconcilable differences. We run the course on the premise that you are all adults who are capable of coordinating your efforts effectively without our intervention. In practice this occasionally turns out not to be the case. If you feel that a team member is not pulling their weight or is otherwise behaving unreasonably, you are free to voice your concerns to the instructor. Use the anonymous comment box if you wish. We may or may not choose to take steps to deal with the problem, but in any case your comments and identity will be held in confidence. If your team develops "irreconcilable differences", then a "divorce" may be the only solution.
Divorces and other team reorganizations. You may reorganize your groups at any time during the semester. Each reorganization requires mutual consent of all parties involved, and/or the approval of the instructor. Please state and justify your intention in an e-mail message to the instructor and the TA, with a cc: to all team members involved. We reserve the right to deny any request to reorganize teams. In particular, we strongly discourage reorganizations whose purpose is to abandon weaker team members in order to combine the stronger members of each team.
Teams and grades. Conflicts among team members are often amplified by stress about grades. It is true that the success of your Nachos team determines a large component of your final grade in this course, even if mistakes made by your team are "not your fault". This is life, and life is not always fair. However, in managing this course we try very hard to understand what is happening in each team and to assign a fair grade to each individual at the end of the semester. In practice, problems with teams tend to matter less in the final grading than most students expect.