The main project lives (and dies) within a 72H time-frame, and involves tight communication between people who had (in our case) never met before, neither physically nor virtually. Problems arise naturally within a few hours, and it is indeed from mistakes that one can learn the most.

What failed

UPDATE (Jul 11 2003) You can get more detailed information on my experience at ICFP 03 in www.thekode.net/icfp03/lessons.html.

Some of the things that happened to us include (I’m using the checklist from "The Pragmatic Programmer" as I write this :-):

• not getting the whole picture from the beginning
• insufficient planning
• communication problems
• incorrect use of prototypes
• inability to properly estimate devel. times
• over-engineering
• not fixing interfaces in time: they kept changing and we lost time readjusting
• we failed to see that a class/module/file is not (in this case) the right granularity level to achieve parallel development
• ad-hoc sub-teaming was sub-optimal