How to educate non-developers at your organisation about how their software gets made
Workshop
This workshop will teach you to design sessions to help non-developers at your organisation to experience and learn how their software is built and shipped.
Many aspects of designing, coding and delivering working software are very often a black box for a portion of the team. Things like servers, databases, version control, and continuous integration are concepts very familiar to developers and other technical roles. Other team members, on the other hand, tend to keep a reasonable distance to those, even though they are also impacted and constrained by them.
This knowledge gap affects the team’s capacity to make decisions and work well together. And, while mostly unavoidable by the different specialisations in software teams, it can be improved if looked at deliberately.
This session will show you how to design courses to help to bridge some of the knowledge gaps and share with the whole team the technical aspects of getting software from concept to production.
This session is intended for anyone involved in software delivery projects.
We expect at least part of the audience to have a good understanding of how to ship software in their projects (developers, ops, QA).
Less-technical people are also welcome, and they’ll equally benefit from this session.
Attendees will learn how to design and run sessions to share how their software is built to less technical people:
For the more technical audience, this will help them improve how they communicate with the rest of their team. It will also help challenge existing decisions as they need to be looked at from a new angle to explain to a new audience.
For the less technically inclined people, this will help to increase their understanding of what’s involved in getting their software built. It can also give them a chance to get their hands a bit dirty and experience how it’s like using the actual tools and processes that developers work with daily.
Teams should also benefit from those sessions as their shared understanding increases, and they can make better decisions together.
Short introduction followed by practical group activities.
00:00 - 00:15 - Short introduction
00:15 - 00:35 - First activity: analysing how your software is built.
00:35 - 00:55 - Second activity: designing training sessions.
00:55 - 01:15 - Third activity: presenting your course
01:15 - 01:30 - Conclusion and feedback
Each group will generate course material that can be run in at one of their member's organisation. Those will be shared with the other conference attendees to stimulate further discussions.
Specific good practices and pitfalls will also be captured and shared with the attendees.
If the audience would like to share how their courses are being received at the organisation, we will create a mailing list for the attendees.
This workshop is inspired by actual training given at a client. The response was extremely positive, and it demonstrated there’s an appetite for “technical sessions for non-technical people.”
The process of designing this kind of training was also fascinating, so this workshop is an attempt to distil and share the lessons we’ve learned along the way.