There are two portions to this reflection. It’s a little more time-intensive, but I can’t stress how important it is to set yourself up for success for the remainder of the semester.

  • Individual (due 9.02): You will read and reflect on software engineering team processes and management.
  • Team (due 9.07): You will come up with a 1-page process plan that includes roles of individuals, processes you’ll adhere to, and platforms you’ll use to support those processes. Details released soon

In CSCI 205, some students didn’t have a good experience with agile processes. But you should reflect on how this project environment is different. You are working with an external client. That means that you could have changing and/or unstable requirements. It also means that the scale of your project is larger, with more complex moving parts. This is up to you.

A key point of this semester is that I’m not going to dictate precisely how you are to operate (more give you a framing). However, I do expect significant reflection and action surrounding your processes*. This is your opportunity to experiment with professional processes for productivity.

Individually (09.02)

Before you continue, make sure you familiarize yourself with the agile processes you learned 205:

Spend some time coming up with the structural mechanisms by which your team will operate. Amy Ko’s Cooperative Software Development has a fantastic summary of the research and practices surrounding effectives teams. Look over at least two of the following:

Once you have a good sense of what makes an effective team, individually answer the following questions in 1 page. You may use bullet points if you’d like:

  • Come up with a COMMUNICATION plan that involves knowledge-sharing tools (from Amy Ko article on communication). How will you communicate? How often? What platform will you use?

  • Come up with a plan to reduce Sedano’s taxonomy of waste to make sure that your team is PRODUCTIVE. What tools will you use? Who is responsible for what? How will you ensure accountability and transparency?

  • Similarly, how do you expect to amplify your team’s PROCESS. If you are familiar with senior design, you’ll know that you should be using an agile scrum development process. However, those guidelines still leave a lot of ambiguity and interpretation that you can sculpt to your particular needs. Consider how to integrate notions of awareness, ownership, distance, product value. How will you know what’s happening in your team? Who owns what?

Constraint: For some consistency, each team should minimally maintain a Product Backlog, a Sprint Backlog, and maintain some view of progress (such as a burn down chart).

Make sure you have a copy (even if digital) to bring to class on 9.02 and 9.05.