The adventures of teaching computing science to university students
I was meeting with some local developers the other night and one of the topics that came up was how to move from traditional fixed price projects to agile ones. The developer I was chatting with works for a firm that submits tenders to projects, where the clients all expect, and want fixed prices for
While at the University of Kent in Cantebury last week for the HEA-ICS conference I had a chance to discuss some of the other programmes that offer students places in software houses either as part of their undergraduate programme, or as an extra job for which they need to apply for a place. At Kent
The other week as part of the summer conversion MSc group project preperations I took the Measurable Value case study by Ryan Shriver and turned it into a working example that the students needed to work through. This exercise worked, but could’ve been better. Ryan also gave me permission to make use of his example
There is a new 2009 Chaos Report from the Standish Group. It still shows the poor success rate for software projects, and that many are still challenged with budget and delivery issues. Things are not any better since the 2006 Chaos Report either. They are somewhat better than the original 1994 (or at scribd) report
Clarke Ching is setting up another AgileScotland workshop in Edinburgh for the near future ‘before summer’ as he says. The theme is ‘using agile to save your job‘ and will be a mixture of ‘how to do agile’ and experience reports. I went to one of his workshops last year and found it real useful.
Students, especially the MSc students, are always wanting to have industry related projects. One way to do this is to get industry to come to us for software projects. This will not happen overnight however. I’m sure the other universities who’ve done this also started small. Some sound impressive, and are relevance to what we might
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