The toughest week of development would be the first week we worked together. I joined a team that were all a group of friends. This made the team dynamic very smooth as the team already knew how each team member worked, what their strengths are, and how to communicate with them. As an outsider coming in, I was not familiar with them and tried to get the team to use one form of communication they were not familiar with; Mattermost. Of course the team didn't use Mattermost and used Messenger to communicate instead. I was not aware of their Messenger chat and was very confused to see tasks being completed and decisions being made without anyone talking about it.
The team had really good communication skills and were cooperating with one another, I just was not aware of it, so I assumed there was a problem. I tried to get people to be more active of Mattermost and post their scrum meetings there. It was then that they realized I was not in their chat and invited me to a whole new world of team coordination and communication. Things went much more smoothly from there.
The quality of the end product was not really affected by my isolation. It caused minor conflicts within the team as I had perceived a problem when there really wasn't one. All the information I needed to know what kept up to date in their documentation and I could catch up to speed. The lesson I learned from this is that when joining an existing team, it is important to discover their team dynamic, how they like to work, and what they like to use. Mattermost was a hassle for them to use, so they stopped using it for what was more convenient and worked better. Its best to find what works early to make the work later easier.
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