(Original creator: jyotisingh)
On Tuesday December 1st, Uniface was invited to deliver a guest lecture at the Technical School in Amsterdam for the students who have ambition in the Technology area. From Uniface Berry Kuijer, JiaoJiao Xia and I were the representatives to share their knowledge, expertise and real-life experiences with the students. The presentation started with an 'Introduction of Uniface' focusing on few key points, by Berry Kuijer: -History and vision of Uniface -Customers and the market span -Business model -Development and deployment -A live Uniface application development demo Next in line were Jiaojiao and I to give a presentation about "Scrum in Uniface lab." We briefed the students about the software development methodology used for managing the product development in Uniface. First we explained how the agile-scrum methodology are being used in Uniface Lab, by maximizing the team's ability to deliver quickly, to respond to emerging requirements and to adapt to evolving technologies and changes in market conditions.
Second part of the presentation was about showing the ‘bigger picture’ of scrum by giving a real life example and how to apply it in daily life. We gave an example of what started off as a simple story in the lab and then showed how it became more complex and larger because of additional requirements. We wanted the students to understand that in the “real world” of software development, you can’t always foresee everything in the beginning. With the example we gave—we realized more about the complexity of a feature and its impact on the existing software architecture while started working on the feature, and therefore how a particular requirement would than emerge bigger than it appeared before. There are of course many other examples of how things can change during the process of building software.
Uniface Lecture Team
So we took them from defining the features (user stories) into the wish list (product backlog), proceeded by planning those into workable timeslots (sprints) while reviewing the progress on the daily scrums to present the finished result in the review or demo meeting. Concluding with the retrospective to reflect and learn how to improve the process by knowing what went well and what can be improved. This was emphasized while reviewing examples on how it worked in practice in our teams and with our product owners in Uniface. Finally, we told them that they could apply this methodology to their team assignments and their current studies or practices.
The presentation was well received by the students as the whole atmosphere was stimulated by interaction and interesting questions coming from the students. The concept of SCRUM was very clear and they could relate to our “real life” example when requirements change, get larger, etc. It was a great experience for us and we also believe that the students benefited from being exposed to the perspectives that the Uniface guest lecture team provided.