Some tips on selecting a team.

Forget who your friends are. If your friends do not fit the requirements below, they won't be your friends after you have tried to work with them on a team.

Choose partners who have similar work habits to your own.

Do you work best in the mornings, but your partners work better in the evening? Do you like to get started on assignments quickly, but your partners usually procrastinate? Are you neat and precise, but your partners are more laid back about how they work? Are you organized, but your partners are chaotic?

Choose partners who have similar abilities.

You may be tempted to choose a partner who is vastly better than you in some critical skill relating to the project. Unless you all are very controlled about sharing the work, the skilled partner will do everything, and hate the rest of you. You, on the other hand, will learn nothing, may do poorly, and find yourself subject to dismissal. There are only two cautionary notes on this: you must make sure that at least one individual can serve as a knowledgeable reference on C++ and at least one can serve as an effective editor for English. Code must be good and documentation must be good, and someone must be able to review both. If all team members are competent in both areas, so much the better. If not, remaining team members must be willing trade their services in other areas in return for these abilities, if necessary, so that the workload is balanced.

Choose partners who have similar goals and expectations.

Do you want to do the best project in all of history, but your partners are happy with a passing grade? Do you want to learn as broad a sweep of course material as you can, but your partners would rather focus on a few issues in depth? Do you want to apply as many techniques as you can to the work, but your partners want to specialize on one or two useful tools.

Choose partners who have similar workloads and resources.

Can you allocate five hours a week to the course work, but you have a partner who is loaded twelve hours a day and struggling to keep up? Do you have to travel home to Calgary every Wednesday, but your partners' parents live in Waterloo? Do you have to come to the Math Building to accomplish all your computing, but your partners have PC's, modems, and printers?

Pay attention to interpersonal dynamics.

Make sure there are no potential personality conflicts. Two people with dominant personalities, for example, and each with a need to control, provide a recipe for team stress and discord. Be aware of other possible incompatibilities as well. People with different attitudes to responsibility and with different styles of thoroughness or precision may also come into conflict. Ask yourself whether you can really enjoy associating with these other people throughout a long and difficult term.

Please note well: part of the grade assigned to your team will be based on the Instructor's assessment of whether the team was competently and carefully chosen!