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By Dirk Riehle, on April 20th, 2012
The AMOS lab course (Praktikum) is our main class to teach agile methods using Scrum (for process practices) and XP (for technical practices). We aim to make this as real as possible an experience, so students are grouped into (sometimes large) teams and are developing one piece of software during the semester. Typically, it is a web service or an app. Students learn the product management side (release planning, iteration planning, review and release) as well as the development side (effort estimation, test-driven development, etc.) of software engineering processes. Best of all, it is all public! You can get an idea by looking at the following documents:
Every week,
- there is a lecture introducing the main topics. Generic versions of the lectures are available publicly and have been taught around the world already, and
- students finish the prior week-long sprint (Scrum’s iteration) with a review and release and plan the next sprint, letting them experience a steady development and delivery rhythm.
To give you an idea of how serious and tangible the output is, take a look at the prior AMOS projects, which are
Mydosis received its first round of funding and FSA!, the younger sibling, is on its heels.
We are always interested in industry collaborations, so if you’d like the lab course to explore one of your ideas, please let us know. You might find yourself in a customer role for the course, talking to students eager to learn from you and to develop some great piece of software!
By Dirk Riehle, on March 15th, 2012
If you intend to take AMOS in SS 2012 please take this survey. It will remain open until the last week before the semester starts.
Please register for AMOS or PROD on StudOn as soon as possible. Both classes are oversubscribed. If you got “wait-listed” it doesn’t mean you won’t get in. We will make a selection based on team formation and not on who came first. But first, we’ll try to take more students. The main issue is (mostly) not a limit in the number of students that we can take, but a limit in the size of the available room. Last year, students had to sit on beer benches, and that’s not really acceptable.
For AMOS, we need to know which role you want to play. Is it a 5 ECTS Product Manager (Scrum: Product Owner) or a 10 ECTS Software Developer (Scrum: Team Member) role? For this, please fill out this survey and let us know your email address at the end.
By Dirk Riehle, on March 10th, 2012
Should we teach in English or German? Or both? But then, which class in which language?
This question is at the center of an on-going debate, and it is a hard question to answer. Here is how the Open Source Research (and Teaching) Group is looking at the situation.
The fundamental assumption is that we (German Universities) want to attract students who are not native German speakers. There are two main reasons: (a) It is a large market (for education) and (b) Germany needs new and fresh blood from abroad. English is the international language and the main common denominator. Spanish never made it there and Chinese is a long way off and might never make it either. German, of course, is a remote also-ran.
There are basically two conflicting forces:
Continue reading English or German? Deutsch oder Englisch?
By Dirk Riehle, on February 10th, 2012
The upcoming Agile Methods and Open Source lab course (AMOS) just got even better with the arrival of a Google TV device shown below. Thank you Google!

By Dirk Riehle, on January 24th, 2012
Today, a colleague confided in me:
“Dirk, if I were a student, I wouldn’t attend your classes. I never liked to speak up and would rather cram for an exam at the end of the semester rather than open my mouth in class.”
Well, that was quite the bummer. However:
We teach to make the most of your time: To achieve the highest possible learning in the shortest amount of time. Your (student) time is precious, and so is ours. For that, we encourage active class participation. To make this clear, parts of your grades depend on that participation.
Look at the following increasing steps of class engagement:
Continue reading Why We Teach The Way We Do
By Dirk Riehle, on January 20th, 2012
Our two main courses for SS 2012 are:
You can now register using StudOn.
By Dirk Riehle, on November 14th, 2011
The chair of Geograhpy studies at LMU published an entrepreneurship ranking of German universities, see this PDF. FAU’s total score is in the top third, place 21, up from place 34 two years earlier. I’m not entirely sure how to interpret it, but one thing about FAU stands out: On the dimension of Entrepreneurship education, it scores bottom third, hurting its overall score.
I’m not sure this is a fair assessment, or maybe if it is, the question of why needs to be asked. That the recent EXIST IV funding round directed all money to Munich, Bavaria’s capital, rather than some to Nuremberg, Bavaria’s second largest city, is not going to help. But if entrepreneurship education needs improvement, the OSR Group is doing its part. With FIRM, PROD, and AMOS we are offering three entrepreneurship related classes to students.
In particular the AMOS lab course has spawned the Mydosis startup, which recently received seed stage funding of about EUR 100K. We are now working on the successor, Free Seas Ahoy! while still supporting Mydosis. From my (professorial) perspective, the ranking results support my current approach: Rather than trying to be a broad platform for many startups, I’m hands-on with exactly one startup per year.
By Dirk Riehle, on October 13th, 2011
Google has been a generous sponsor of the AMOS lab course in the past and just doubled, well, ten-folded down: After a trip I found this boatload of Nexus One phones on my desk. It will be very helpful to students to actually experience and experiment with the phones on campus rather than being (mostly) confined to the Android emulator. Thanks so much, Google!!
By Dirk Riehle, on September 11th, 2011
Here a list of (permanent) links that point to the schedules of classes we teach.
|
Code |
Type |
Clickable |
Copyable |
Full Name |
Status |
| FAU |
PSWT |
Lecture |
Schedule |
http://goo.gl/0fy1T |
Applied Software Engineering |
Every WS |
| FAU |
ADPP |
Lecture |
Schedule |
|
Advanced Design and Programming Practices |
In Planning |
| FAU |
NYT |
Lab Course |
Schedule |
http://goo.gl/VqoFO |
Nailing your (Research) Thesis |
Every WS |
| FAU |
AMOS |
Lab Course |
Schedule |
http://goo.gl/BZpU8 |
Agile Methods and Open Source |
Every SS |
| FAU |
ARCH |
Seminar |
Schedule |
http://goo.gl/ZXJjg |
Software Architecture |
Every WS |
| FAU |
PROD |
Seminar |
Schedule |
http://goo.gl/tTAI0 |
Product Management |
Every SS |
| FAU |
UXD |
Seminar |
Schedule |
|
User Experience Design |
In Planning |
| FAU |
FIRM |
Seminar |
Schedule |
http://goo.gl/Xpz90 |
The Software Firm |
Irregular |
All of them are world-readable Google Spreadsheets.
By Dirk Riehle, on July 27th, 2011
Free Seas Ahoy!, the 2011 AMOS Project, reached its 1.0 version today at http://fsahoy.com, finishing of the semester and the lab course with a successful 1.0 release. Check it out! And below, please find a few photo impressions from the final Scrum review and release session as well as the business plan presentation. Thanks to everyone who participated and worked hard to get FSA! out the door. And stay tuned for what is yet to come…

Continue reading Free Seas Ahoy! Released 1.0 Version
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