About: Make cool sh*t and put it on the internet
As part of a colaboration with a local university, I have to give a talk to undergraduate CS students about real-work programming. They are coming on-site to our webdev offices.
I want to convey the notion that requirements are constantly changing and much of the difficulty lies in managing complexity. Does anyone have any ideas for workshop style activities I could run on this topic?
I like that idea. thank you. Now I just have to come up with a project idea.
Be a scrum master/product owner for a demo product and have your students be part of the scrum team. You go over the product backlog and discuss the new features that you want to implement. Let the students figure out what can be done and why in a sprint cycle. The time allocation could be part of the exercise. Maybe someone estimates 2 days, another 5 days, which could open up discussion about why and where their head's at. Let them break things down bit by bit.
Thanks, i hadn't thought of introducing the notion of sprints, but that's a good idea.
You could walk through a simple program/assignment that has a certain set of requirements. For this assignment, you could play the role of Business/QA and let the audience play the role of the Programmer(s) on the project. Throughout the activity, create a dialogue based on potential requirement changes and encourage them(group of devs) to collaborate with you (BA/QA) to come up with a viable solution.