What We’ve LearnedFrom Building Basie

and lots of other software

using student labor

over the course of eight years

Greg Wilson http://third-bit.com Feb 2010

I Beg To Differ

“…student projects,while laudatory,frequently fail todeliver anything

useful.”

http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/10/26.html

About a quarter of the student projects I’ve helpedsupervise since 2002 have delivered software thatclients actually used, and the rest have produced

something just as useful: experience.

The Big Picture

368 people, 136 projects, 35 countries of origin

How We Got To Basie

2002

2003 2004

2005 2006

20082007

2009 2010

Start running directed studiesprojects at University of Toronto

First attempt tobuild portal(using Java)

UCOSP

Join U of T fulltime

Why Another Portal?

1) Self-hosting2) Simple3) Batch operations4) Sustainable

SourceForge and Trac already exist; why build another portal?

Cabot & Wilson: “Tools for Teams: A Survey of Web-BasedSoftware Project Management Portals”. Doctor Dobb’s Journal,October 2009.

We’ve Been Busy!

https://basieproject.org/stable/basie/

We Have Tickets!

https://basieproject.org/stable/basie/

To Make a Long Story Short

1) You have realistic expectations

2) You’re patient

3) You realize that “how” matters more than “what”

Undergraduate students can builda lot of great software

If:

1) Realistic Expectations

Most students are doingfive courses at once

Which leaves them 8-10 hours/week for your project

A 13-week term is equivalent to 3 full-time weeks

How much do you expect a new (junior) hire to doin their first three weeks on the job?

Realistic Expectations (cont.)

Most faculty are working evenharder than their students

“We’re here to do research,they pay us to teach,we spend our time on admin.”

They care about computer science,which is not the same thing as programming

You can’t blame them for doingwhat they’ve been trained to do, either

2) Patience

Your project may be the first timestudents have written somethingthat isn’t just going to be markedand thrown away

And the first time that 90% rightisn’t good enough

You must not make students feel like failuresfor working the way they have been trained to

Even (especially) if those ways are wrong

Patience (cont.)

“Why don’t schools teach students[Git | Haskell | GPUs | cloud]?”

Because the curriculum is full

4 years × 2 terms/year × 13 weeks= 4800 hours

The hard part isn’t figuring out what should be in there

The hard part is getting agreement on what to take out

3) How, Not What

Q: What was the most valuablelesson you learned fromyour project?

Nobody said “technology”

What they did say was:

• Teamwork• Prioritization• Code review

• Presentation skills• Negotiating with real users• Building their network and portfolio

By the way, our project students are 28.5% female

There’s A Textbook For That

Karl Fogel:Producing Open Source Software:How to Run a SuccessfulFree Software ProjectO’Reilly, 2005http://producingoss.com

The same skills students need to succeed in grad school

Other Lessons Learned

• How to run meetings• How to teach students how to do code reviews• What level of tooling is appropriate/feasible• Accountability• How to accelerate ramp-up• Carry-overs from previous terms• Importance of full-time summer work (yay GSoC!)• Industry support • Presentations, presentations, presentations• Scoping and re-scoping deliverables• Recruiting students and faculty• Grading

Thanks to Prof. Karen Reidfor this list (and much else)

Help Us to Help You

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Thank You

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