Last Thursday, in a joint effort with Paros s.r.l., we held a seminar at the department of Information Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Trento.

It was the final event of the day for the 2nd of March and a part of the ICTDays program, which is a set of activities spanning across a couple of weeks, organized to facilitate the meeting between Tech companies and Information Technology students that are looking for career opportunities.

We have worked with the Paros team for a cumulative period of almost three years now, and we were looking to share our experience and introduce the attending students to what an Agile transformation may look like - maybe in a company they could be working for in a few years (or months) from now.
(You will be able to read more about our successful collaboration with Paros in an upcoming and more comprehensive case study, so be sure to keep up to date with our latest news!)

The Seminar:

After a brief intro about the Agile principles and manifesto, we talked about the "old way" of doing things.
No shared knowledge about the product, long requirement gathering cycles, impossibly complicated deployment procedures, very few opportunities for growth... You name it.
We then proceeded to illustrate how XPeppers and Paros started their collaboration. One step at a time, it managed to change the company culture, leveraging on the work of both teams.
This introduced a long series of benefits, starting from a collective code ownership of the development team to a deeper commitment to the product across all departments - simply a more efficient process all around.
In particular, we focused on the introduction of Scrum, which allowed us to focus on creating business value: rather than planning in terms of technical considerations, such as software layers, this framework helped the team to plan in terms of benefits for the customers and their final users.
The following step was introducing technical practices taken from Extreme Programming, like TDD, Continuous Integration, Refactoring, which allowed the team to develop the kind of technical excellence needed to be able to release early, often and continuously.

You can look at our slides here!

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1pyRu8DJr05iFzIazOUs4HJuZ7_osMs_p-Ua_8VsFoKw/edit?usp=sharing

What we have learned:

At the end of the talk, we had the chance to answer interesting questions from the students spanning across a wide range of subjects: from the technical, down to earth stuff to the most abstract concepts addressed by our process.

It was a very stimulating experience and a chance to take a fresh look at our company environment from the perspective of young, newly trained people.
We are definitely looking forward to more opportunities like this one, where we get to keep in touch with the emerging professionals in our field.

If you were attending our seminar, please let us know your feedback and any questions you may have left by contacting us through our website.
We'd love to hear from you!