Your team coordinator will create a Slack workspace which you will all use for communication within the team when you are not all in the same location or using a synchronous audio or video connection. With student schedules being what they are, most of your intra-team communications will not be synchronous, although face-to-face is always preferred.
You will get a #generalchannel when you setup your team's Slack workspace. The instructions below will have you create #virtual_standups and #team_contract channels for those purposes. Your team should create other Slack channels as it sees fit to separte communication related to specific project areas into a channel for the team members working in that area.
1) Setting up the team's Slack workspace
Everyone on the team should create Trello and GitHub accounts for themselves, if they have not done it already. The GitHub account should have the Education Pack added. For more information on these tools refer to the Resources page.
After teams are announced, setup a Slack workspace with the format tttt-swen-261-ss-a-name where
tttt is the academic term, e.g. 2195
ss is your section number, e.g. 05
a is the letter for your team assigned by your instructor, e.g. a, b, c, d, e
name is an optional name that the team creates for itself. Note that there is a limit to the length of your Slack workspace name. You may have to go without the team name in your team's Slack workspace name, or keep it short.
After you have created your team's Slack workspace, you will change the workspace name, but leave the URL the same using these instructions. This will make it easier for your instructor to find your workspace amongst all the teams in one or more sections that the instructor is teaching.
From the dropdown menu attached to the workspace name, select Administration -> Workspace settings
Scroll down to Workspace Name & URL and click Change Workspace Name & URL
Change the workspace name to ssa where ss is your section number and a is your team letter, e.g. 10a. Leave the Workspace URL unchanged. Click Save Changes.
You might also want to personalize the icon for your workspace from the Administration menu.
Invite all of the other team members to this newly created Slack workspace using their RIT email address.
Invite your instructor, and student course assistant, if your section has one, to join your Slack workspace using their tool id information on the course homepage.
Be sure to make your Instructor (and course assistant if applicable) Administrators of your slack.
2) Virtual standup channel
In your team's Slack workspace, create a virtual_standups channel. With the varied schedules for all of the team members, it will be very difficult for most teams to hold daily, in-person standup meetings. This channel will serve as a substitute for an in-person or other synchronous standup meeting on the days when the team can not do one. More information about conducting and reporting your synchronous in-person and asynchronous virtual daily standups is here.
There are a number of add-on tools, such as https://geekbot.io/ and https://standuply.com/, that you can incorporate into your team's Slack workspace to support team members in doing their daily standups. Or you can simply set an alarm at a certain time each day with Slackbot to have it remind the team members to complete a daily virtual standup.
As the project progresses, the team may want to create other channels to structure the intra-team dicussion a bit more than everything in #general. Some possible additional channels might be #when_to_meet, #design, or #presentation.
3) Creating a team contract
All of you should have completed the Team formation survey - individual exercise. In the second part of that survey you indicated what you would want to be true about your team for there to be an environment of trust within the team and for you to be fully committed to the team.
Once your instructor has divided the class into teams, there is a Team Responsibilities item in the Content area of your myCourses site. This provides you with access to a report of the responses that each member of your team gave in the second part of the Team Formation survey. Your team should discuss those responses. Based on those discussions, your team will create a team contract that each team member will agree to abide by. Follow these guidelines when you create your team contract:
Create at least five contract terms that all team members agree with.
Each contract term is a simple sentence or two that describes some responsibility of an individual team member or the team as a whole.
Contract terms can describe broad commitments that cross-cut team activities, or are specific to particular development activities. Your contract should include both types of contract terms.
In your team's Slack workspace, create a team_contract channel. Enter each of the contract terms into this channel.
Each team member will "sign" the team contract by making an entry after all the contract terms are in the #team_contract channel indicating "I agree to abide by the terms of this team contract."
By the date indicated in your section's class schedule, deposit to the Slack workspace - team dropbox in the Team Exercises area a screen capture image that shows the terms of the team contract, and each team member signing the contract.
