🧑🏽‍🤝‍🧑🏽 day-plan

Features features features

🔖
  1. Energiser
  2. Demo Time
  3. Morning Break
  4. Retrospective
  5. Lunch
  6. Sprint Planning
  7. Afternoon Break
  8. Project work

✍🏽 Register

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.

Demo Time!

Learning Objectives

Preparation

Have your presentation downloaded on your computer and/or shared with whoever will have the main computer in the class.

Introduction

You have two main goals for today:

  1. Make your demo in 5 minutes

  2. Appraise your peers’ demo, asking questions if you have any.

Your demo

🎯 Goal: Present your achievements in a 5-min demo (5 minutes)

  1. Identify what your slot is for presenting.
  2. Make sure your presentation is up and running.
  3. Do some nerve-calming exercises so you feel more confident.
  4. Smile.
  5. Present amazingly.

Morning Break

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

Retrospective

Learning Objectives

Preparation

Identify clear examples of positive and negative points you want to discuss.

Define which board you want to use to capture the feedback. Miro, Figjam, EasyRetro, etc.

You can open the board and ask people to add examples beforehand (steps 1 and 2 of the exercise).

Introduction

Retrospective is about celebrating what is going well, identifying what isn’t going well, and agreeing on actions to improve your team processes. Be honest and kind when talking about the examples.

Your retrospective

🎯 Goal: Assess the positive and negative traits in your team’s (60 minutes)

  1. Open the chosen board.

  2. Give everyone 5-10 minutes to add their examples. Make sure you use 1 post-it/ticket per example.

  3. Start reviewing the examples.

    • Usually, we start with the positive ones first.
    • Ask the person who wrote the example to give more input to the group
    • Open it up for questions and detailing

  4. Agree on an action for that example, if applicable.

    • Write the action on the board
    • Define who in the team will be responsible for delivering it
    • Agree on a deadline.

Cooling period (optional)

🎯 Goal: Solving conflicts as part of a team (30 minutes)

Conflicts are part of life. It can occur more often in high-pressure moments, such as delivering a product in a short period. It might happen at any moment in the week, but the retrospective usually brings them up more clearly.

Team conflict

If you see that you and your team struggle to collaborate, communicate or work together positively, and conflict is getting heated, you can use this cooling technique.

  1. Stop working and take a 5-minute break.
  2. Reflect on what you think is working well and what is not working.
  3. Discuss your preferred ways to communicate.
  4. Re-establish how you will work together as a team.
  5. Create a 5-step action plan about how they will resolve further challenges.

Individual conflict

If the conflict is about one specific individual, they must talk to a volunteer about the following:

  1. Their strengths and weaknesses.
  2. Reflections on how they will work together with the team.
  3. Clear action plan to resolve further challenges.

This must be done so the trainee can work on the team again.

Lunch

Take your lunch break and be back in an hour!

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.

🧩 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: