Teaching students regular software development practices is unhelpful, so teach them to collaborate as a team. When teaching people how to do software engineering and… Read More »Traditional software engineering is insufficient
Provide rules to guide student teams in their work. Whenever teaching software engineering students that are formed into teams I find various challenges that come… Read More »Guide your software engineering teams
Collaboration speeds your product development more than software practices on their own. Software practices are insufficient to achieve good outcomes. We need to teach our… Read More »Teach your teams the collaboration rules
Students need to be holistic in their approach to software development. Software development looks ‘obvious’ to students in software engineering courses. You gather the requirements,… Read More »Software development involves more than the code of the application
We overestimate our ability to multitask at our peril. You can walk and talk with a friend. You might knit and watch TV. Both knitting… Read More »Teach students that multitasking is evil
Bottlenecks are more common than people realise, and aren’t always attached to bottles. I realised later that the previous post about theory of constraints, forgot… Read More »Mind the bottleneck: Why students should recognise one
A little theory of constraints goes a long way in building lovable products. The people student teams are building a product for can’t provide feedback… Read More »Teach students theory of constraints concepts to improve their product development
Focus on making a lovable product, not ‘minimum’ component. I always get nervous when students say they’re focusing on building the ‘minimum viable product’ (MVP).… Read More »Promote simple, lovable, complete to your students
We help our software engineering students by helping them learn to collaborate effectively. A lot of what we teach computing science students is domain knowledge,… Read More »Learning to collaborate is learning to be employable
Coordination could be passive participation, while collaboration is active participation. Compare two teams of students. Team A coordinates the work between members, while Team B… Read More »Collaboration is more than coordination