🧑🏽‍🤝‍🧑🏽 day-plan

🔖
  1. Energiser
  2. Launch overview
  3. Morning Break
  4. Prep your product
  5. Design your product
  6. Lunch
  7. Writing user stories
  8. Sprint planning
  9. Afternoon Break
  10. Project Work

Bad Interview Answers

Learning Objectives

Preparation

Grab a list of common interview questions from somewhere like Coursera.

Please set a timer for 15 minutes.

Introduction

We have a lot of serious work to do, but let’s start with some fun

Let's energise

🎯 Goal: Let’s wake up and have a laugh (15 minutes)

1. Interviewer: Cold call a random person and ask them an interview question. Choose an ordinary question.

2. Interviewee: You must give a terrible answer to this question (keep it clean, please!). Then cold call another person to be the interviewer.

3. Interviewer: Give absolutely straight-faced feedback. If you laugh, you’re out and must nominate another player to complete your feedback and return the game to step 1.

What is the Launch module

Learning Objectives

Preparation

Everyone must have done the prep work

Introduction

We have a lot of first-time volunteers helping at the Launch module, so it is always good to ensure they and the current volunteers and trainees understand what the module is about.

Kick-start the Launch

🎯 Goal: Understand the Launch module (30 minutes)

Discuss the following questions as a cohort (trainees and volunteers):

  1. What have the trainees learned before joining the Launch module? Think about Tech Ed and Professional Development (PD) learnings.

  2. What will be the main challenges for the trainees?

  3. What will be the main challenges for the volunteers?

  4. Why do we do the Launch module?

  5. What should we make sure we don’t do at the Launch module?

  6. What are we doing on the Saturday sessions?

  7. How many mid-week check-ins should each team have?

  8. What are the common mistakes made by teams?

  9. How will you deal with the conflicts below?

    • Safeguarding: someone is at risk, and you don’t know what to do.
      10
    • Abusive behaviour: could include code of conduct violation.
    • Disengagement: a trainee or volunteer not participating
    • Poor technical contributions: The trainee is contributing, but the code is not good enough or actively bad; the team cannot deliver weekly releases

  10. Would you hire this trainee? Why is this question important for trainees and volunteers to have in mind? And if you would not hire them, what should you do?

Morning Break

A quick break of fifteen minutes so we can all concentrate on the next piece of work.

Notes

Prep and plan your product

Learning Objectives

Preparation

Ensure your team has done all the prep work

Introduction

When product teams work together, having a good planning and preparation session ensures everyone is on the same page and knows how to collaborate best. It means you might not be coding much today, but learning how to do this work will make you a better software developer and ensure you develop features that generate user value.

What is expected of your product

🎯 Goal: Understand what an MVP (Minimum viable product) is and the key qualities of your product. (45 minutes)

Discuss and agree on the points below with your product team.

Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

  1. What is an MVP (Minimum Viable Product)?
  2. How can you avoid increasing scope?
  3. How do we define what should be part of the MVP?

Functionalities

  1. What does it mean for your website to be interactive? 
  2. The product must be completed in four weeks of work. How can we ensure the scope is the right size?
  3. Be well-defined: what artefacts can we use to ensure all functionalities are well-defined?
  4. Visual Design Complexity: how can we avoid making our visuals too complex?
  5. Answers to questions: trainees are learning, so how can we, as a team, learn without giving each other just the answers - or expecting immediate answers from your peers?

Define your product

🎯 Goal: Define your product and features (60 minutes)

To ensure we can keep the scope lean and everyone understands the product, briefing and features the same way, follow these steps:
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  1. Work on this Lean UX Canvas on this Miro board, Exercise 3.1

  2. Do a user story mapping (an example is on the same Miro board, Exercise 3.2)

  3. Define the features that will be included in your MVP.

Design your product

Learning Objectives

Preparation

Ensure your team has clearly defined and understood the MVP

Introduction

When designing and defining mock-ups as a team, we bring to life our ideas, discuss which one is the best and then define how we want to move forward. 

It also ensures we can show stakeholders what the product will look like, keeping it open for them to suggest changes in layout, images, colour, styles, etc.

Design your product

🎯 Goal: Design the mock-ups of your product (60 minutes)

1.  Work on the exercise 3.3 on this Miro board

2.  Validate your mock-up with stakeholders, business owners or any available user

If you are building something for the CYF Community, you can use this Figma as a reference.

Community Lunch

Every Saturday we cook and eat together. We share our food and our stories. We learn about each other and the world. We build community.

This is everyone’s responsibility, so help with what is needed to make this happen, for example, organising the food, setting up the table, washing up, tidying up, etc. You can do something different every week. You don’t need to be constantly responsible for the same task.

Notes

Writing user stories

Learning Objectives

Preparation

Ensure your team has a clear MVP and Design

Introduction

When planning your work, you have two important aspects: understanding the implementation constraints and opportunities and writing your user stories.

Implementation details

🎯 Goal: Define the implementation details for your product (30 minutes)

Discuss your implementation details. During the discussion, ensure that the technical jargon is clarified to the team so everyone can understand and be part of the discussion.

  1. What information will they need and/or provide to do that? For example, what pages could you have, and which endpoints must you use?
  2. What entities/resources/data will we have in the system?
  3. What information do we need to store to achieve the goals? Define the collections in the database.
  4. What are we going to need to expose to the React app? Examples:
    1. Are you going to have an endpoint for a resource
    2. Do you need calculation or aggregation between the database and the frontend
    3. What will the REST API look like
  6. You sketched out the page previously. Do we need to review it? How could we decompose them into separate components to work on?
  7. Identify the “edges” between different tasks (e.g. you have to agree on an API so that the backend and frontend match up or on the props passed between a parent component and a child component)

Write the user stories

🎯 Goal: Write user stories for the planning session (30 minutes)

When raising your tickets, you can have two types of tickets: 

  • a user story, which focussed on business value (Format: AS A [role], I WANT [action], SO THAT [outcome] + acceptance criteria [rules/scenarios])
  • technical ticket, which is a step in the direction of a user story (Background [why], acceptance criteria [rules/scenarios]
  1. Discuss and agree on the first 5 or 6 user stories that need to be done. Just use titles to identify them.
  2. Work on 1 user story and 1 technical ticket together as a team.
  3. Now, each team member chooses one ticket and writes it. Think about clarity so that anyone outside the team can understand it, too. They will be discussed in the next session.

Sprint planning

Learning Objectives

Preparation

Ensure the team has created user stories

Introduction

Agile software teams often work in ‘sprints’ - specific chunks of time where we commit to a development goal, like “Goal: Get the homepage working”. We try to set a single goal and focus on reaching it together as a team.

This helps ensure we’re working on the most important thing (we’ll have lots of ideas for different things we can build, and we don’t want to get distracted). And it should encourage us to work together as a team.

For this project, we’ll be doing 1 week sprints. So, we should plan and start a new sprint at the start of each week. 

Sprint planning is the process of planning our week, specifically focused on our development backlog and picking which user stories to include.

Plan the sprint

🎯 Goal: We have a 1 sprint of work planned in our project board (45 minutes)

  1. As a group, review the Backlog of user stories on your Project Board
  2. Discuss the user stories - make sure they all have a detailed description of what you need to build and check that everyone in the team understands them. You can check this by asking everyone - would you feel comfortable implementing this yourself? (if no, check why not and add more information) 
  3. Arrange the user stories in priority order - put the most important ones first. These stories should help us reach our MVP and solve customer problems faster.
  4. Start moving the user stories from your Backlog column to the Prioritised column. Keep going until you have enough for a week of work - this is your ‘sprint’. Estimating how much you can do in a week might be tricky. Tip: not enough is better than too much. We can always add more later.
  5. Describe your week of work as a goal in a single sentence. Keep it focused on your product, not the technology. For example, “Goal: Get the homepage working” is better than “Goal: Setup the SQL database.” 
  6. Post your goal to the class Slack channel, e.g. “This week’s sprint goal for the Amazing Coderz team is: Get the homepage working!”

Afternoon Break

Please feel comfortable and welcome to pray at this time if this is part of your religion.

If you are breastfeeding and would like a private space, please let us know.

Notes

🧩 Project time

Learning Objectives

This time is set aside to work as a team on your project.

Use this time wisely

You will have project time every Saturday. Don’t waste it. Use it to:

Notes

Learning Objectives