Introduction
This section is a practice library: a collection of well-crafted exercises you can run with your team or on your own. They exist to help you execute your project well and to prepare you for the graded assignments, which are the source of truth for what is due and when.
The activities are organized by theme:
- AI Practice: one-way doors, safety nets, agent-driven testing, acceptance judgment.
- Career Preparation: resumes, portfolios, interviews, networking.
- Communication: presenting, writing, accessibility.
- Conflict Resolution: conflict styles, performance conversations, escalation paths. The explanation lives in the conflict guide.
- Creative: ideation, brainstorming, design sprints.
- Design: architecture, prototypes, technology evaluation, security.
- Planning: metrics, prioritization, risk, scheduling.
- Reflective: reading, watching, journaling, external feedback.
- Requirements: canvases, user stories, research questions.
- Teamwork: stand-ups, team health, dysfunction assessments.
- User: finding real users, interviews, personas, UX maturity.
Three Tiers
Section titled “Three Tiers”Activities carry a badge telling you how much attention each deserves.
Workshop Nine activities everyone does: four in fall, three in winter, two in spring. These run as workshops in class and are graded complete/incomplete; the weights and the item list live on that page, and the schedule has the week each one runs. There is no quality bar and no rubric. Submit the output and you get the credit.
| Workshop activity | What it makes easier |
|---|---|
| Team Formation Strategies Assessment | The Team Charter conflict and inclusion section, written the week you meet |
| User Story Mapping | docs/requirements.md for every repo checkpoint, and the winter Definition of Shipped |
| Describe your Architecture | docs/design.md, your RFC, and the defense technical-depth question |
| Audit Your Safety Net | Four criteria across the checkpoints, the RFC, and the defense. The highest-leverage hour in this library |
| Dependency Mapping or Critical Path Analysis | The Definition of Shipped: every external clock named and started |
| Team Dysfunctions Assessment | The midterm peer evaluation, and the defense role question |
| Test Plan | The first winter repo checkpoint: the tests that must exist before real users arrive |
| Team Health Assessment | The charter refresh and the midterm peer evaluation; the Project Retrospective later |
| Identify Success Metrics | The Landing Page and Release and Metrics |
Every workshop spends its second half redoing the exercise with an AI agent, so you see where delegation helps and where it misleads. Resume Building also runs as a spring session; its output is graded in the Career and Individual Retrospective, not as a workshop item.
Recommended The cheapest route to a specific rubric criterion. Every graded assignment page names the recommended activities that prepare it, and says which criterion each one serves. If you are staring at a rubric wondering where to start, start there. Repeated assignments (sprint notes, repo checkpoints) name different activities for different instances, so you are never asked to redo the same exercise.
Everything else is the library. More than a hundred further exercises, kept because they are good and because your project may need exactly one of them. Nobody expects you to do most of them. Each assignment page also names one or two activity categories worth browsing when the specific recommendations run out.
Your Outcome Type Changes the Answer
Section titled “Your Outcome Type Changes the Answer”A team contributing patches upstream, a team running experiments with a professor, a team building software for an external partner, and a team inventing a product do not need the same preparation, and pretending otherwise wastes everyone’s time. Most assignment pages carry a By outcome type table naming the activities your outcome type specifically needs, alongside the ones everybody does.
If your project is research or R&D, the ones worth knowing about early are Define Your Research Questions, Map Your External Approvals and Complete an IRB Application (both in fall week 1, because neither clock runs faster for starting late), Identify Success Metrics, Reproduce Your Baseline, Make Your Artifact Reproducible, and Keep an Experiment Log.
How to Use This Library
Section titled “How to Use This Library”Follow the rubric, not the whole list. The fastest path: read the rubric for what is due next, do the recommended activities it names, and ignore the rest until you need them. Every activity ends with what a good output looks like, and most state the effort involved, so you can judge the investment before starting.
Do the nine workshop activities regardless. They are the ones that pay off more than once.
You are encouraged to email your instruction team for early feedback on your progress.