In my software engineering class, most of my colleagues found it frustrating that instead of coding, what we were doing for the past 2 months had been writing documentations, business rules, acceptance tests, refining our charter & features, designing use-cases and building test-cases. I did, too, for a moment, until I realized that all is worth it. I’ve just finished the book (or literature) we are supposed to read throughout the semester – Lean-Agile Acceptance Test-Driven Development by Ken Pugh. The book actually refined how I saw agile.
From features to stories to tests, we had to create acceptance tests for each one of them. I thought it was a nuisance at first, until I figured out that those acceptance tests weren’t for me. It was for the customers themselves. The acceptance tests were means of communication. When my group and I met for our project, we were too confused to the point that we just spent a whole night rewriting our documentations, discussing the features over and over again and thought all of us already had an agreement. I THOUGHT we already came to an agreement. But the fault was mine, all along. We had trouble doing the ATDD approach because we never knew why we were doing it in the first place. (It was probably because our prof told us to).
And now that I know better, I actually dis vow going through implementation (coding) when our documentations, stories and tests aren’t setup properly yet. Or to the very least partially correct. I’m learning how to harness creativity within the group. And how to get everyone to adapt the same principle.
I’ve actually realized that this class ain’t supposed to teach me how to code, but instead, it’s showing me how to properly engineer code. And I’m absolutely enjoying it.
My team and I are building an inventory management system for a retail store in our local community using the Django Framework. And I really see potential within my group, and in our project. Who knows, maybe i’d get to end up working with them in a startup in the future. And i would actually love that. I just really hope i’d be able to contribute to their learning and experience. Well that’s actually one of the reasons why i’m trying so hard to learn fast. Been reading the whole day for the past weeks. Do you have any references worth recommending? Send me a tweet @RoselleEbarle. Thanks!
