Agile at ITI Marconi

June 9th was the last day of school for all students... Well, not for all :D Some students of the I.T.I. Marconi in Dalmine enrolled to a class that Sorint provided in partnership with ITS Rizzoli: 5 days of training to Agile Methodologies. This course gave the students also 25 hours of PCTO.

How was the class? The first day, the trainer (well, myself! lol) made an introduction to the most important project management methodologies (namely waterfall Lean, Kanban, Agile, Scrum), and briefly explained their history. This was not a simple frontal lesson, but students were involved with games and live questions to keep their attention always high.

On the second day, the students were given a project to work on: build a sort of ERP for gym using Python, and they were asked to use the Scrum. So they divided into 4 groups of 6/7 people, "elected" the Scrum Master and the Product Owner, made their backlog of features board on Trello and started developing. Everyday they had the Daily Scrum, and discussed their progress towards the Sprint Goal. I suggested them how to proceed with an iterative and incremental approach, and emphasized that a product is never "completed" nor "finished".

On the fifth and last day, they performed the Sprint Review where they showed their product to the stakeholders, and held the Retrospective where they discussed what went well and what they could have improved.

Overall all student were engaged with the project and were very happy! They asked me a lot of questions on how Agile and Scrum approach could have been used not only in development, but also in everyday's life