This year at school I have been able to take part in a two semester practicum. A group of my fellow students and I are tasked with creating a piece of software from the bottom up following all of the Software Engineering principals that we have learned in school. Each group of students in my practicum course had to find a client who needed some software built for them and elicit requirements from them. Then from there they start the whole process of designing software; making system diagrams, designing objects, planning databases and so on. The students then move on with the development of the software (the fun part). The students then end the project with a one hour presentation to the department faculty, industry professionals and fellow students about their software and their experience. I wanted to share some of the things that my group and I did to make the best of and learn the most from our practicum.
1. Start early
We actually started talking to our client during the summer. This helped a lot as we had a much better grasp of the problem as September rolled around and the clock actually started. We actually have proof of concept code code written the third week of school for some components we knew had to be in the our project. Starting early also helped us and our client “buy in” to the project early. All of us have cared deeply for the project since the first day back to school and our client still continues to give us good ideas and effective criticism.
2. Leave your programming comfort zone
We took this opportunity to learn something new and try something neither of us have done before. We decided to build the whole project on bleed edge .NET technologies in C#. None of us had experience with C# or .NET. Yet today we use ASP, WCF and WPF in our project. We had to plan in a lot of extra time into schedule for learning everything, but is has certainly paid off and we all now have new skills to put on our resumes. Ill write more about what our project is about in a post soon.
3. Spend lots of time together
During the first semester of our practicum, we spent 10+ hours a week in scheduled meetings. During those meetings we discussed design/architecture, we programmed individually and we did some paired programming too. All of this time together was great because we could bounce ideas off each other very quickly. Since we were all learning something new, we also all got a chance to teach the other members of our group something we just learned. It may seem like overkill, but I strongly suggest planning as much time as possible to be in the same room together and just work together. It is just much easier to communicate face to face instead of in IM/Email.
Anyone else who has done a practicum in school, I would love to hear your story about it in the comments! Also, if you are thinking about doing a practicum and have any questions fire those off in the comments too!
