It has always been hard to explain
to students the concepts behind agile development method unless they are part
of a real project. In this article I will be explaining an interesting exercise
introduced by Thoughtwork[1]
to help students gain the main concepts behind agile by getting them to design and build a new kind of
animal, in LEGO, using a simple iterative process.
To start the exercise you need LEGO
boxes, small whiteboards, user stories, and customers. Divide students in the
classroom into different groups and give each group a box of LEGO, a set of
user stories, and a small whiteboard. Then ask your students to draw two
columns on the whiteboard. This will result in three different sections; backlog
section, will consist of user stories students are expected to finish in an iteration
(number), and completed user stories. Students are then asked to put all the
user stories in the backlog section and decide as a team which user stories
they could achieve during the first iteration.
Give them five minutes to read the user
stories and decide which stories they are willing to achieve, after that
students will move the stories they have selected from backlog section to the
user stories expected to finish section
and start building the animal.
One customer is assigned to each
team and he introduces himself to the group of students at the beginning of the
exercise. It is expected that the students will start asking the customer
straightforward after receiving user stories for more clarifications. However,
in the first iteration most students didn’t ask because they are still unaware
of the importance of customer involvement in agile development. They will
realise their mistake later on when the customer checks which user stories they
actually completed at the end of the first iteration and find out that whatever
they were working on in the iteration is not what the customer wants.
At the end of the first iteration,
students present to the customer their animal and the customer moves all the completed
user stories to the completed user stories section in the whiteboard and uncompleted
user stories go back to the backlog.
After the iteration finishes, each group of students are
asked to do a retrospective to determine what went right, what went
wrong and how they could improve in the upcoming iterations.
In the second iteration students are given new user stories,
which they add to the backlog and the same process is carried out again.
However, this time students understood that they should keep the customer
involved. Therefore, they might ask him at some stage to sit with them and help
them build the animal.
This exercise will help students understand the main
concepts behind agile and help them practical apply agile in classrooms.
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