We wanted to explain Agile to school students in an hour — here’s what we did
Earlier this year, my colleagues and I presented to a group of female high school students considering careers in technology, as part of a program run by TCS. It was an awesome experience to share our stories with them and teach them about the possible opportunities ahead of them.
The Women in Tech group at Nine Publishing has several goals to encourage diversity in technology teams. We work on initiatives to support women starting out in their tech careers, career growth/mentoring, returning from work after maternity leave and also moving up the ladder to leadership positions.
We also hope to help encourage and inspire young women to study computer science and associated areas, to pursue careers in field that is experiencing ongoing growth and offers the chance to have rewarding careers on the cutting edge of new tech.
It was with this in mind that we offered to be involved in the GoIT Girls program run by Tata Consultancy Services, which offers groups of around 20 female high school students the chance to learn more about Information Technology careers during their allocated work experience time. It’s a wonderful program teaching students a lot of the basics about what they can expect, and connecting them with women working in the industry.
Meeting the students
My colleagues Felicity Yan, Maryam Abed and I were delighted to head to the TCS office to meet the young women. Felicity is an Engineering Manager, Maryam a Quality Engineer and I’m an Iteration Manager, running delivery and Agile processes.
We presented to the students about how we got started in tech careers, and how we had learnt so much about how the world works and connects, have met many incredibly intelligent people and enjoy living in the fast-paced, ever changing tech landscape. We talked about the thrill of working for highly regarded publications like The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian Financial Review, and contributing to their digital presence through the development and maintenance of their websites and mobile apps.
We also cleared up misconceptions that the industry is a ‘boys’ club’; while the numbers are still heavily weighted towards men, most companies have an inclusive working culture and team collaboration and connection is a must for success.
The students were interested in tips on how they can get started in their career now, while still at school, and we advised that it’s never too early to start learning to code and building a portfolio. Aside from school courses, there are a lot of apps, courses and tools available to help learn these skills, and no minimum age! Hackathons and meet ups are a great way to connect with others in the industry and can also help beginners get started.
The Agile Game
To make our presentation a bit more hands on and fun, we also developed a game to teach the students about Agile development processes.
The game required some Uno playing cards and a stopwatch.
First of all we asked the students to break off into groups of 4, and choose who would take on each role — Product Manager, Designer, Engineer and Tester. The Product Manager’s role was to give the ‘product requirements’ to the Designer: in this case, how many cards were needed, and if there was any particular mix of colours needed. The Designer would then deal the specified cards, and hand over to the Engineer, whose role was to flip each one and put them in the given order. When she handed over to the Tester, the Tester would validate that the requirements had been met — once this was done the timer could be stopped as a successful product had been ‘shipped’.
However, as often happens in the real world, there were interruptions and changes. In the first round the task was to process 20 cards, but during the testing, an alert came in from the Product Manager that the ‘users’ did not give good feedback on a particular colour and so we would need to start that batch again, excluding that colour. This was an example that has real world equivalents in things like the emergence of a bug/issue or new information, or project funding being cut off.
So in round two, the process changed to 5 cards being processed at a time, rather than all 20 in a huge batch. In this case, when changes came mid way, less work was lost and less time was wasted.
What did they learn?
We asked the students the difference between processing all cards in smaller batches as opposed to one large batch. They pointed out that the overall processing time was faster as less time was wasted with rework, and that the feedback was able to be actioned more quickly.
They also noted that in the Agile round, there was less down time for each team member, as there were several batches coming through all the time.
It was really wonderful to see these ideas click with the students — they could see an example of Agile development and the benefits for efficiency.
