Development Team Structure and Process
Callysto Development Teams and Sprint Process
Callysto Development Teams
Teams will consist of 2 to 6 people:
A university (PIMS) professor.
1 - 4 student developers (Callysto creators and developers).
A K-12 teacher (or subject matter expert) advisor.
Roles
University (PIMS) Professors can assist in the content and in the supervision of the students (Callysto creators and developers).
Callysto Creators and Developers are student developers who are (or will become) Jupyter experts, and will be doing much of the coding, writing, and testing of the demonstrations under the direction of the professor and K-12 teacher. The goal of both "Callysto Creators" and "Callysto Developers" is the same: to create Jupyter notebooks for use by teachers and students in K-12 classes that demonstrate the use of Jupyter notebooks integrated into the course curriculum. The demonstrations will cover a variety of topics in math, science, social science, humanities and so forth. The demonstrations will also be used at conferences and workshops to showcase and train teachers and school administrators to use the technology. Workshops will also be used to prepare the developed Jupyter notebooks for use in the classroom.
K-12 Teacher or Subject Matter Expert (dependent on availability) are curriculum or subject matter experts that will advise which curriculum content to develop, as well as help to advise and/or review Jupyter notebook content once it has been created by the Callysto creators and developers. When available, they will be advisors during the sprint and/or will review the notebooks once they have been created.
Organization
Development teams will be primarily based at PIMS universities (for funding reasons), and report to the PIMS Site Directors and the Innovation Coordinator, Michael Lamoureux. The overall project manager is Byron Chu at Cybera, who will coordinate the activities of the creators and developers through the PIMS professors.
Callysto Developers, the students, will be writing code, mainly in Python on Jupyter notebooks, but also wrangling HTML code, eBook sources, Pandas for data analysis, and more, with the above stated goal of creating high quality demos. They will be reporting to a professor or instructor at the PIMS university, work closely with the Creators (K-12 teacher) on the team who will be suggesting curriculum topics to develop. Both Creators and Developers will use their own initiative and creativity to come up with exciting and innovative way to showcase the abilities of Jupyter in the K-12 context.
Development teams may also bring in subject matter experts from other places (eg Oceans researcher, Earth Sciences researchers) to use their work as source material for these demonstrations. Collaboration with these groups will be done under the continuing direction of your team leader.
Personnel will need to track and record their work hours, in order for us to track budgets and operations. Note there are constraints on the amount of time students can be working, as well as constraints on the K-12 teachers because of contracts and/or union rules.
Callysto Development Sprints
Development teams will work work in an agile scrum structure, where they will work in iterative 2-week sprint periods. During the 2-week period Callysto creators/developers will be assigned to selected development stories (e.g. develop a specific curriculum module in a Jupyter notebook) by their university (PIMS) professor. An assignment to the story is a commitment by the team to develop and complete the story during the 2-week sprint. Once a story has been completed it will be subject to review by an experienced developer (from the PIMS and/or Cybera development teams) and, when available, a K-12 teacher or subject matter expert.
Details on what stories are available and committed to can be found on the Callysto Curriculum Jira board.
Follow these steps to access JIRA for the first time: 1. Go to jira.cybera.ca 2. Click on the "Can't access your account?" link 3. In the "Enter your username" field, enter your EMAIL ADDRESS and click "Send" 4. Check your email for password reset instructions
NB: this assumes that your account was already added to JIRA. If not, please contact your PIMS leader or someone on the Callysto Slack workspace.
Sprint Process
The agile process employed by Callysto involves meetings:
Sprint Planning (1 hour bi-weekly usually on Monday)
This meeting marks the start of the sprint where teams select and commit to development stories from the backlog for the 2-week sprint period.
Sprint Demonstration and Backlog Grooming (1 hour bi-weekly usually on the 2nd Friday of the sprint)
This meeting marks the end of the sprint period where development teams will demonstrate the notebooks they have created and their work can be marked as completed and ready for review by a subject matter expert.
Incomplete work for the sprint period can be carried over to the next 2-week sprint period.
the Backlog Grooming portion of the meeting is where new stories can be entered into the backlog and discussed for development during a future sprint.
Daily Stand-ups (optional, everyday for a maximum of 15 minutes)
University (PIMS) leaders can decide to hold a daily stand-up meeting where each member of their development team explains:
What they completed yesterday
What they are planning on completing today
If they are encountering any road-blocks or impediments to the completion of their story
NB: Please ensure that your university (PIMS) leader invites you to these sprint meetings.
Development Workflow
In most software development you will see some sort of development cycle. Our notebooks are no different, however it is important that we develop notebooks with the needs of educators and the K-12 curriculum in mind. For this reason, it is important to include their ideas and feedback at the early stages of content creation to ensure that our notebooks are relevant and useful.
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