Example of Strategic Pattern:
Brainstorming
Brief Description:
A healthy exchange of ideas in an attempt to resolve a known problem or to discover new problems. The team members, often along with the leader attempt to analyze a problem and offer solution alternatives to examine. When a consensus is reached on what the best next step is, the meeting is considered successful.
Cause:
When a single problem or list thereof starts to become a stumbling block to progress of the team, a brainstorming session is usually called.
Some teams know from previous experience that ideas flow easily in a brainstorming session and schedule them in as part of the team's normal meetings.
Sometimes, just a catch-up or update session becomes an ad hoc brainstorming session based on need and a sudden involvement of members of the team.
Effect:
This is a healthy means of allowing all team members and others to attempt to resolve problems and share their ideas and feel like they are contributing.
It also puts into practice the notion that the collective intelligence of a group is higher than the sum of the individual.
This is also a means of actively engaging the team members into discussion.
Example:
Denise and Bob talking about ways to cover and interpret the code.
Denise: (taking updates) How far along are you at the code?
Bob: I looked at the stuff that you sent me. And need to change the numbering.
Denise: Changing parenthesis to brackets would work.
(code variables discussion between Justin and Denise)
Denise: Did you try a function declaration for dot?
Justin: Yes, I tried it and still doesn't work, I will have to rearrange the some other functions that do the same thing in there.
Denise describes some problems with the code, regarding the damping mode block. Hank suggests using one block to calculate the active damping values and use that instead of the way the code was previously structured. Or to use an S-function which also does the same way. There is a healthy exchange of ideas in this meeting between Denise and Hank. Hank shows the working of particular flags being set in certain S-functions on his computer. And then leaves it to the team to decide how they prefer doing it. Denise asks if Hank knows where the logical breaks in the code are, because it is not structured such that it is easy to determine that. Hank makes some suggestions in ways to identify the breaks and other things which might help the team structure the code. They discuss using different data structures like arrays or structs to help manipulate the code better. Denise says the documentation is not completely helpful in explaining how to use structures and passing them. Hank says that trying to use the structs might be taken as a challenge and could keep things interesting.