Thanks to the wonders of modern communication technology, I was interviewed by Rob Sabourin as part of his course on Software Engineering Practice for McGill University undergraduates in Montreal, Canada.
I took part in a small group interview with McGill students back in February 2016, as I wrote about in my blog post, A small contribution to the next generation of software engineering professionals I did another interview in April 2022 for the same Software Engineering Practice course and was more than happy to repeat that experience when Rob invited me to join his Fall cohort.
The early evening timeslot for Rob’s lecture on “Estimation” was perfect for me in Australia and I sat in on the lecture piece before my interview.
I’ve spent a lot of time in Rob’s company over the years, in both personal and professional settings, watching him give big keynote presentations, workshops, meetup group talks and so on. But I’d never witnessed his style in the university lecture setting so it was fascinating to watch him in action with his McGill students. He covered the topic very well, displaying his deep knowledge of the history of software engineering to take us from older approaches such as function point analysis, through to agile and estimating “at the last responsible moment”. Rob talked about story points (pointing out that they’re not an agile version of function points!) and estimating via activities such as planning poker. He also covered T-shirt sizing as an alternative approach, before wrapping up his short lecture with some ideas around measuring progress (e.g. burndown charts). Rob’s depth of knowledge was clear, but he presented this material in a very pragmatic and accessible way, perfectly pitched for an undergraduate audience.
With the theory over, it was time for me to be in the hot seat – for what ended up being about 50 minutes! Rob structured the interview by walking through the various steps of the Scrum lifecycle, asking me about my first-person experience of all these moving parts. He was especially interested in my work with Scrum teams in highly-distributed teams (including Europe, Israel, US, China and Australia) and how these team structures impacted the way we did Scrum. It was good to share my experiences and present a “real world” version of agile in practice for the students to compare and contrast with the theory.
It was a lot of fun spending time with Rob in this setting and I thank him & his students for their engagement and questions. I’m always open to sharing my knowledge and experience, it’s very rewarding and the least I can do given all the help I’ve had along the journey that is my career so far (including from Rob himself).
Rockin' and Testing All Over The World 