My thoughts on Agile so far…

After having just completed our first Sprint using the Agile model, I must say I’ve been very pleasantly surprised at it’s effectiveness — but, before diving straight into my personal retrospective of our first Sprint, let me give some backstory into my experience in learningThe Agile Way with P’Pond for the past few weeks.

To be frank, at the start of the term, my expectation of the Agile class wasn’t very high. It had never been offered before with a first-time teacher at the helm. There wasn’t even have enough students interested to open the class in the first place. However, having met P’Pond once before (and just for a few minutes), I was convinced that we’d be learning some useful, real-world ideas and so I persuaded more than a handful of fellow students to enroll in the class (thus if the class turned out to be subpar, it would be on my head!).

Starting off, we had to introduce ourselves by citing our most relatable superhero and favorite drink. I chose Antman (Hank Pym)obviously, and Bubble Blueberry Green Tea (as it has become my go-to drink in the past year).

Next, to simulate real-world work experience, we used fake legos to build a model city based on Mayor Pond’s requirements — which was as fun as it sounds.

Later, we wrote a step-by-step guide for aliens on ‘How to make Toast’.

Following that, P’Roof came in to show us how to use Test-Driven Development (using unit tests to dictate how you write code) to produce code with easily-measurable progress (i.e. 19 out of 37 tests completed), while satisfying all of the project’s requirements. We also had a fun demo of group programming, which showed us that two heads are better than one:

We were then introduced to the idea of Design Thinking. It was an interesting concept, but ultimately it was the class I felt I learned the least in — not because of the speaker, but rather it was too general (probably due to the short time-constraint) and so, I didn’t feel like I gained much of what I hadn’t already known. In saying that however, we did do a cool crazy-8 demo, with which I produced a MVP (Minimum Viable Product) of my million dollar phone-cover/wallet idea.

All in all, the Agile class definitely exceeded my expectations. It was less like traditional college classes, and more like an innovative Tech company’s training sessions — I do enjoy my other classes, but it’s pretty refreshing to have classes like this one.

My one qualm up to this point was that many of the concepts we learned seemed to be ‘good-to-know experience’ which we will not see the benefits of any time soon. But, even that changed when we started doing the Sprints…