Tag: Agile@School

Agile@School 2017 – When the projects come true

Last time we had a great time. I’d have expected some trouble, some problem to manage. Well, everything has been well done. Anything goes. This is the reason why I’m attaching the pictures of the results hereafter, because it’s the best way to describe how the students were making their ideas. Keep in mind that we’re speaking about 18 years old guys, not startups!

Pictures paint a thousand words.

Introducing the teams:

The Messinesi team (Amanda and Alex) is developing a real time collaborative chat. Similar to the famous Slack, its purpose is to make the team’s member more aware of technologies used nowadays, like SignalR and the latest releases of the .Net framework. The name of the project is Notify. The guys are also following an interesting course with Visual Studio, in order to be prepared to become real developers in the future. As you see below, the development is still in progress, it’s just a matter of design. Due to the nature of the project itself, we need to wait for the next releases.

The Random team (Thomas and Luca) is presenting us a natural language bot, without any deep learning in this first release, which replies to a set of questions about Italian famous writers. It replies showing links, information and texts about the author requested by a real user. The name of the project is Italian Authors and it’s been made by integrating the Wit.ai APIs. It will eventually run on Facebook Messenger via Heroku platform. Lots of technologies!

The Scrubs team (Enea and Sebastiano) is working on a similar project, based on a natural language bot, without any deep learning in this first release, which replies to a set of questions about two topics which we should take care of, sports and photography. Also in this scenario, the real user interacts with the chatbot. The name of the project is CPP and it’s been made by integrating the Wit.ai APIs. It will eventually run on Facebook Messenger via Heroku.

 

The Domotic team (Nicodemo and Mattia), as the name of the team describes, is realising an IoT real time application which interacts with a prototype of a “smart house”. You can open and close doors and windows, turn on and off the lights. In this first release, you cannot clean the floor, but I guess we need more time for that feature… Actually the guys could integrate a robot 🙂 . The name of the project is Future House and it’s developed for Arduino using also php.

 

The Human Recognizers team (Marco and Francesco) is developing a face recognition Android app, which associate pictures of people in order to get information about age, mood and so on, also printing a string related to the mood itself. The name of the project is iFinder in consumes Android sdk and Face API by Microsoft. The result is impressive.

The Bar Santa team (Simone And Mirko) is hacking a remote-controlled car. As a result, they’ve got a super car with a camera onboard, stepped motors for wheels, and sensors. Everything mixed in a dedicated chassis, printed by the school’s 3D printer. The name of the project is SuperCar (do you remember Kit?) and it’s been made for Raspberry Pi3.

 

I don’t want to bother you with the teams’ retrospectives and ceremonies, but this time they worked perfectly. Each team started to discuss with us about the pros and cons of their choices, the things to do and the ones to avoid in the future. They depicted everything using starfish diagrams (in italian):

 

What can I say? AWESOME! This is how I’m feeling right now. Lots of ideas, technologies, integrations, and definitely FUN! I hope that everyone else agrees with me.

I guess that the exam will be a great show for those guys, also. The next post will be about the pitch videos they’ll create for each project. I’m excited but I have to bite my tongue, because I’ve already seen something and I don’t want to spoil anything, so…

Stay Tuned!

Agile@School 2017 – let’s start over

As a recurring project, Agile@School is started again on February, with a new set of projects and ideas. Gabriele will help me again, but it will be a very difficult task. During the past year we followed a Scrum approach, in order to comply the team structure. As you can read here, there were one team with a small bunch of members. Now, we’re getting “bigger”. As a result, we’ll have micro-teams of two/three member each. Great chance for Kanban. Let’s give it a try.

01

How will we approach in the beginning?

  • defining a set of micro-team, that we call “task forces”
  • designing a Kanban board
  • describing personas
  • speaking of some ceremonies we’d like to get rid of
  • speaking of some ceremonies we’ll keep
  • describing the customer journey and the story map practices

The task forces

The term not fits very well, actually; indeed, a task force is something that could be considered as a “defcon 1” team. However, we would give the teams a label which is “strong”. To be honest, we have a little amount of time, so in the end we can say that we’re in hurry already 🙂

The Kanbard board

As we said above, we will have more task forces, most likely six. Therefore, the board will use columns (as usual) for the status management and rows (aka Swimlanes) for separating teams and projects.

02

The board will be created in Visual Studio Team Services, in order to use also the Source Control Manager which relies on it.

Personas

Each team member will populate a simple card, the Persona card, which is depicted in the picture below:

03

As you can see (in Italian), the first column is for Persona details, the second for interests and the third is the “role” which the member would like to have. I know that the last column is not included in any best practice, but I feel that some student could start to think about its job and its future. Could be interesting.

The customer journey

During the next meeting, we’ll ask the students to show us their customer journey. Each team will have to describe the journey of a typical user, with mood for each action it takes and the value which it gets by the action itself.

Conclusions

Kanban, task forces, boards, customer journey, personas, etc. This year is full of new things to get knowledge from. Also the source control manager will change. We will use git on VSTS so we will get different projects in the same place in a quicker way.

And now, let’s start over! 🙂

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!

Continue reading “Agile@School – 7th episode” →

Agile@School – episode 5

It’s time to review the work done.

The web application the students are working on is reaching its end, speaking about development. It’s not so good to see, we know it, but starting from this sprint, we will apply some graphical stuff and we’ll be ready to present the tool to the “board”.

Continue reading “Agile@School – episode 5” →

Agile@School – episode 3

Agile@School project is growing and finally we’re reaching the most important part of the iteration.

In this third episode we played the planning poker game on a round table (which appears like a poker session at a first sight actually 🙂 ) and the students decided to skip the coffee break! You know how is really difficult for them to be focused.

Continue reading “Agile@School – episode 3” →

Agile@School – episode 2

In this post, we’ve introduced the Agile@School project, a new way for managing school projects.

The second “episode” I’ve added an actor, Gabriele, a student which will be the scrum master. We’ve achieved the real number of team members, which is 9 and we’ve understood also the interests of each member. The final goal is to create a team and to manage the teachers idea of project for the final exams.
Scrum master
Gabriele, will be the scrum master. Since I’ll be the coach, I need also, let’s say, an “external” person. He’ll help me in separating the heavy amount of work and in facilitating the team.
The project
The project is based on a product called “Ex-students yearbook“. It’s a database of students which studied in the school, which provides also a web user interface for both the front end and the administration back end.
The team
We’ve got 9 members. Now, is time to understand the skill of each team member.
Next time, likely this saturday, we’ll go deeper and we’ll start to add user stories and PBIs on VSTS. We’ve got already the document with specifications. For each story we will define the Personas and after this step, we’ll start to play to Planning Poker.
In the end we want:
– Get VSTS with PBIs in Product Backlog
– Make PBIs with efforts
– Get the first Sprint backlog
– Get the list of tasks for the first sprint
– Get the capacity and the roles in the team
– Define the sprint duration and ceremonies schedule
Then, the students will start to coding!
Stay Tuned! 

Agile@School – A new way for managing school projects

Last Saturday, I’ve shown the Agile@School project at ITSOS Fornovo Taro, the school in which I’ve studied for five years, just before starting to work as a junior developer.

ITSOS has been (and this is true right now) at the forefront of computer technology and now, thanks to the new “technology course”, the project becomes really interesting. During the year, indeed, the teachers have spoken about development methodologies, both for Agile and Waterfall approaches. This sounds great, especially in Italy.

Continue reading “Agile@School – A new way for managing school projects” →