Agile@School – 7th episode

In the 6th episode’s post we’ve spoken about the concept of “sprint failure” and “start again with a new spirit”. Now I can say that we have reached our goals and the application is up and running, ready to be shown during the exam sessions.

We are proud to introduce online Students’ Yearbook!

In this episode we have approached with a “debriefing” phase and a “exam preparation” one.

Debriefing phase

We have made a technical and functional review of the application, this time using the online deployed version. At a first sight we can see the differences between the previous version and this one. You cannot see them, because we didn’t show the webapp yet, but, trust me, it’s completely different now. It’s a brand new application. The review has increased the mood of the students as well as the teachers one. This moment is difficult for them all, because the exam day is less than a month. What we did?

  • we have evaluated the application, now is ready to be presented
  • we have confirmed the logo (you can see it as the featured image of this post)
  • we have evaluated the sprint, the team member’s behaviors related to the ceremonies and team habits
  • we have spoken about outcomes with a short retrospective

In the end, Gabriele and I have signed the certificate of attendance (made by Prof. Pedullà) and we delivered it to the students.

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As you can see also the school Director has signed the certificate, which means that the project has been a success and it can be repeated next year!

Preparation phase

It wasn’t easy to share the concepts to the students. However I have created some courses of study. The first two lessons I have held in the past were focused on “common vocabulary” and “glossary”, in order to show what the “transparency” stands for (transparency-inspection-adaptation). These are my ideas:

 

  1. Agile manifesto and principles
  2. Scrum, glossary and roles
  3. Sprint, glossary and ceremonies
  4. Agile gamification (http://www.agilegamification.org)
  5. Documentation of the project (user’s manual and business presentation)
  6. Application technical description (tech manual and technologies)
  7. Visual Studio Team Services deep detail

The first three paths are related to the agile principles and scrum based metrics and ceremonies. The fourth is a particular way for teaching the “teamwork”. The definition of the agile gamification is “Gamification is the use of game thinking and mechanics in non-game contexts to engage users in solving problems and drive desired behaviors.“. The fifth and sixth topics are related to the web application and to its documentation. The last one could help the ones who want to technically speak about the tools used for implementing the team management.

Three of seven students have chosen the “theory” paths in order to take advantages from the glossary during the exam. One of them will take the whole exam in english, so scrum vocabulary will be a great advantage. The others will tell about the documentation processes, technical perspective and applied technologies. Unfortunately, no one will bring the gamification, which I find really interesting.

As you can see, the outcome is great. And now, good luck to “my” students!

Stay Tuned! 🙂

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