Requirements for Successful Participation in the AMOS Projects
Students participating in the AMOS projects perform a weekly sprint retrospective, which includes giving feedback to the lecturers. One information systems (Wirtschaftsinformatik) student unloads on us:
This whole thing seems to be some kind of bad joke of computer science people, which non-computer scientists seem not to get. It is absolutely ridiculous to use a code repository for planning documents, especially one like GitHub with its absolute horrible usability—or practical non-usability, needing half a dozen different programs to access it and hours to work out how to add a stupid PDF file which has nothing to do with the code. And to fail doing so because some of this half dozen git-tools may have had some tick mark set wrong, some parameter hidden in the endless amount of options which make no sense at all to a casual user or for whatever other reason this may not have worked out. Why the hell are we doing all that, just to learn how to commit PDF files to some awkward system nobody would use in real life anyway? I’m done with this git-thing, I’m done with the whole Scrum-nonsense and I’m especially done with Informatics people and their way of thinking, which seems to create more problems then the world would have had without. Never again.
We regret the bad experience this student is having, but we would like to remind future students to look at the course entry requirements which involve a minimum of technical expertise so that handling a configuration management system like git should not be a problem.
As to putting a PDF into git—we are managing requirements (product backlog, sprint backlog, etc.) using Google spreadsheets, of which we ask product owners take a weekly snapshot and track it on git. The reason why we are not using a dedicated tool is that students complain about having to learn too many tools. We may change this in the future.