---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Jennifer Redman <jen...@gmail.com> Date: 2010/3/31 Subject: Re: Helping students To: Rudy Godoy Guillén <r...@stone-head.org> Cc: Kartik Thakore <thakore.kar...@gmail.com>, gsocm < google-summer-of-code-mentors-l...@googlegroups.com>
Hello! 2010/3/31 Rudy Godoy Guillén <r...@stone-head.org> > > You need not to do the task for them. What you can do is teach them the > importance of setting a scope and estimating time according that. They need > to see the big picture and estimate the required effort, so they eventually > realize that they will need to either reduce the scope or break it down. The > important thing is to finish the job. > > Estimating how long something is going to take is often fairly hard for those of us with experience and can be be particularly difficult for students. Yes it is important to complete the project but as a mentor you need to help your student figure how to be successful even if they spend the whole summer working hard on a project and aren't able to get things working like they imagined in April. Here are a few guidelines that I give students - and anyone developing with temporal constraints to help break up large chunks of development. 1) Think about points of "no-return" - make sure you build flexibility into your project milestones to allow you to choose a different path should your plan not work out. You don't want to find yourself at the end of the summer with a large block of code that needs to be completely reworked because something doesn't work the way you imagined it would. 2) Plan for status reports. Think in terms of what can I get done in a week? 3) Build in test time. You want to do some major testing at least 2 times during the summer - mid-term and finals -- more is recommended. Set up your milestones thinking in terms of "is this a good place to test and allow for bug fixes?" 4) Be flexible and re-evaluate often (see weekly status reports). You might be in week 4 and realize that realistically only half of what was proposed can be accomplished in the summer. Adjust accordingly. Jen
