Sam (Software Developer) and I (Head of Applications Development) recently attended the University of Nottingham Jubiliee Campus, to give a talk to second year Computer Science students that were taking part in the group project module. The talk was entitled ‘What’s it like to work in an agile software development team?’.
The talk focused on how the Esendex development team tackle software development, and we presented some ideas for the planning and development aspects of their own group projects. Sam and I are Nottingham Alumni and we both did the same module as undergraduates at Nottingham. For both of us, the module stands out as the closest thing you’ll experience at university to working as part of a real software team in industry.
It was tough selecting exactly what to put in the talk, ‘agile development’ is a broad subject and means different things to different people. We could have easily talked about the Agile Manifesto for the 50 minutes we had, but in the end I think we did well cherry picking the parts that would interest the students and be relevant to their group projects. We also thought it important to run through a demo of some of the concepts we talked about and this part was especially well received.
We carried out a ‘mini retro’ at the end of the talk, asking the students to leave some feedback on their way out. We split the board in two; ‘What went well?’ and ‘What could have gone better?’, providing the students with some post-its and pens.
You can’t see the comments on the picture below, but here’s some examples…
- Content truly excellent! All highly relevant and interesting, right level of detail
- First live demo from a guest lecturer
- Great to see a live demo, putting theory into context
- Actually related to the group project
- Students might have struggled following the detail of some examples. Slow down a little. Font size and colour, for demo.
![Uni Picture]( "Uni Picture")
If you would like anymore information I’d love to hear from you, please email [email protected].
