Happiness is a Well Defined Ticket - Happy Bootcamp Story 48 of 100

You can feel the relief.

TL;DR: Precision pays immediate dividends when we spend extra time defining tasks in a group coding session. Students gain confidence, as they see their future "job" as not so scary at all.

Imagination Runs Wild

Bootcamp graduates will refuse to put their heart into finding a job, when the fear of the unknown takes hold.

By building real software that we ourselves use in production every day, and then solving every problem and building every feature ourselves as a group, the fear diminishes. But that's only half the story, because now we have all these tickets/tasks/issues and it's easy to get lost in what we are even doing.

Taking the time to really define tickets well - and this can be time consuming - brings much of the rest of the fear down.

Is That All?

"That, I can do."

When each of the student takes their turn, and a more senior student helps them through as a guide, the process moves much more quickly when the ticket is well defined. Confidence increases with every step, and the others watching think "...well, I could have done THAT ticket easily."

Sitting through a few dozen such sessions you can move beyond the normal but extreme anxiety about being interviewed.

Scope Creep is Alive and Well

A side benefit - the student learns more about the back-and-forth that happens between a dev team and the business side.

Since this is our software which we use every day, there is always the temptation to add this or that feature to any ticket. Learning the discipline of sticking to the scope of the ticket prepares them for the feelings that happen on a real job.

Visiting alumni come back to our sessions and tell us war stories about scope creep and the business side that "just" wants this or that. Nope. Gotta learn that here, first.

Documenting Technical Debt

When the ticket is written in very explicit and detailed terms, technical debt isn't an academic term any more.

Now the student has to write a new ticket for technical debt, just to close that one he was working on. "Oh, now I get that" - because he wanted to move on, and that one part of the ticket was not really needed, and had a high cost.

It's a happy day for all attending. That well defined ticket made everyone's time spent feel like now they were a bit more ready for those tough interviews and a new career.

Photo by Jeswin Thomas on Unsplash