Showcases And Why We Need Them

The problem

So my students are mostly awesome. We have come a long way. When we started most of them had not written any JavaScript. In the last few weeks they have been working on their final projects You can see them here, here, here, and here. One thing that they haven’t had a lot of experience with is how to put a whole project together. So we broke them into team and they are coming up with their own product to show future employers. It has been great except for one thing. They have been having trouble prioritizing and getting out features at a regular pace. In Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational he speaks of setting short term deadlines in order to motivate people. So I came up with a plan to help the class along. I proposed that we have the students do showcases every few days. They are expected to have a feature or two in their production environment for each of the showcases (one happens on Sunday and the other on Thursday).

Solution

The results have been amazing. One thing that I saw regularly before having showcases were people getting distracted with things that weren’t that important. They were alos having a problem with figuring out which features to implement first. That no longer seems to be the case. People seem to have found a better cadence since they started doing showcases. They have all come up with an MVP so far and are now working to iterate on their problems rather than build it in pieces (front end first and then integrating that with the back end). It’s nice to see one of the agile practices being so effective.