You and your students benefit when you include the human components of software development.
When you include the human side of software development in your teaching, then you gain a lot, and so do your students. You and your students reduce the stress of development, and experience more of the joy of development.
On the one hand, there can be a lot of stress in software development for team members. There are lots of decisions to make about how you do the work together. There are also the issues that arise when expectations aren’t met. People worry. This means they ask more of the course organiser, or instructor.
On the other hand, there should be joy in collaborative software development. This happens when you attend to the human side of the work. Make it easier to collaborate and anticipate team members’ needs. Team members work more smoothly together. They are less stressed, and more independent, so ask for different types of help and assistance.
Spend more time with interesting student challenges
After you introduce the human side of software development you help people collaborate. Instead of coordinating the hand-off of work from one person to another, people co-create the work together. This makes lots of other aspects fall into place too: Work is aligned more closely with better communication between people. Quality improves, and feedback loops shorten, which speeds up the work. There are also other improvements too.
Using suggestions you find here and in the book, you will spend less time resolving student team issues. Instead of helping them resolve team dynamic issues, you can spend your time helping them level up their collaboration.
The suggestions you’ll find offer solutions to make your teaching easier. There are topics, exercises, and approaches, that you can drop into your courses. Some require you to find some materials, but others only need things you probably have like sticky notes, and felt tip pens.
Yes, using them the first time can be a bit daunting. I know. I went through this too preparing them. You now have solutions that have the edges smoothed off for you. You gain from the experience you find recorded here.
I found that I spent less time resolving team conflicts, and more time aiding teams with other challenges around their clients, or how to compare libraries, and add tests to their work. Instead of personal issues, I was spending more time on application issues.
Personal issues don’t disappear they change
Applying the human side to software development is not a magic solution. It doesn’t make everything better. You will still find there are personal issues that you need to resolve in teams.
Instead of the same issue being faced by all teams, you’ll find that a few teams now have special circumstances that need help. Now, you have more time to aid those teams, because most teams sort themselves out. This means less stress for you, and also fewer students too.
All in all, I’m happy that I included more and more of the human side of software development in my teaching. It aided my students immensely, while also reducing the stress I had in teaching too.
Students gained professional skills they could use now and throughout their lives. They became better people with more empathy for each other.
I gained time to focus on more core issues around the teams too. I spent less time dealing with everyone’s issues, and more time with the specifics of each team. This was good for them and me.
How might you use extra time you could gain from using the human side of software development in your teaching?
This post is part of a project pulling together my materials and ideas about Teaching Team Collaboration: the Human-Side of Software Development for software development to students.
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The ideas above are from my book 101+ Ideas to Improve Team Collaboration, which covers all of these little things that students can do to improve their collaboration.