Workshop Activities

Team·Every term·2% fall, 1% winter, 1% spring

• Workshop 1 to 5Sunday of fall weeks 2, 3, 7, and 8·2% in all·Rubric
• Workshop 1 to 3Sunday of winter weeks 1, 2, and 3·1% in all·Rubric
• Workshop 1Sunday of spring week 2·1%·Rubric

Graded complete or incomplete.

Full credit in class or by Sunday of the week the class met; no late window after that.

In this assignment your team runs an activity from the practice library in class and submits its output. The more than a hundred activities other than the workshops are optional.

What You Produce

Each workshop below is its own entry, with the activity to run, what a complete submission holds, and the later work it makes easier. A submission is complete when it holds everything its entry lists, about your own project or team; there is no quality bar.

AI use: use AI tools the way the activity page describes. A submission that is not about your own project or team, such as a generic output produced without your team’s material, scores Incomplete.

Fall

Workshop 1: User Story Mapping

• Activity: User Story Mapping
• A complete submission: a user story map of your project’s main flows, with at least four backbone columns and one complete walking-skeleton row, its backbone type and the reason for it, written user stories each marked in or out of scope for this year, and the list of questions for your project partner, one for every story you marked ? as assumed
• What it makes easier: docs/requirements.md at every repo checkpoint, in the shape the requirements guide sets out; the winter Definition of Shipped

A map has as many release rows as you need: the walking skeleton is what you build in the fall, Release 1 is the first iteration after it, Release 2 and later follow, and Out of scope this year is the last row. A story in a release row is in scope for this year, and one in the last row is out.

A project whose hardest unknowns sit in a data pipeline or a research question puts its pipeline stages or its research chain across the top instead, in the same story map template the activity links. For a research project, Define Your Research Questions is the natural next step.

Workshop 2: Map Your Hard-to-Reverse Decisions

• Activity: Map Your Hard-to-Reverse Decisions
• A complete submission: the list of upcoming decisions with the few hard-to-reverse ones marked
• What it makes easier: your RFC topic, which has to be a decision that is hard to reverse; the defense judgment question

This workshop shares its class session with Workshop 3, and each has its own submission. Both land before the RFC draft is due on Sunday of week 4, and the hard-to-reverse decision you pick here is usually the RFC topic. Describe your Architecture is recommended the same week and takes an hour or two as a team; it feeds docs/design.md and the RFC framing.

Workshop 3: Audit Your Safety Net

• Activity: Audit Your Safety Net
• A complete submission: one specific named gap in your checks and the smallest change that closes it
• What it makes easier: four criteria across the checkpoints, the RFC, and the defense

This workshop runs in the same class session as Workshop 2.

Workshop 4: Peer Technical Design Review

• Activity: Peer Technical Design Review
• A complete submission: your one-page design, the findings the other team gave you, and each finding marked accepted or declined with a reason
• What it makes easier: the RFC final, due the week after: its revision criterion, and the defense technical-depth question

Pair with the team at the next table for the whole session; with an odd number of teams, one group of three reviews in a ring. Nothing is prepared before class; draw your one-page design from your docs/design.md. Afterward, turn the findings you accept into edits to docs/design.md or into ADRs.

If your project is under NDA

The other team sees your design page, so describe components by their role (a message queue, a model server) and leave out the partner’s specifics. If that isn’t possible, contact the instruction team.

Workshop 5: Identify Success Metrics

• Activity: Identify Success Metrics
• A complete submission: 2 or 3 metrics with their decision rules and a named instrumentation method for at least one, written down and dated
• What it makes easier: the v0 Definition of Shipped draft at Repo Checkpoint 2 in week 10, and the spring Release and Metrics: the number that proves it worked, chosen while there is still time to instrument it

Winter

Workshop 1: Dependency Mapping or Critical Path Analysis

• Activity: Dependency Mapping or Critical Path Analysis
• A complete submission: a dependency map and critical path analysis, with the bottlenecks and the adjustments you made
• What it makes easier: the Definition of Shipped, due two weeks later: the external prerequisites named and started

Workshop 2: Team Dysfunctions Assessment

• Activity: Team Dysfunctions Assessment
• A complete submission: the dysfunctions you identified, a strategy for each, and a reflection on how they will improve the team
• What it makes easier: the midterm peer evaluation, sent in week 5: naming a problem before the survey does; the defense role question later

Workshop 3: Test Plan

• Activity: Test Plan
• A complete submission: a test plan for the paths that must work at the release candidate, with their test cases, methods, and pass criteria
• What it makes easier: Repo Checkpoint 3 in week 5: the tests in CI that must exist before real users arrive at the release candidate

Spring

Workshop 1: Team Health Assessment

• Activity: Team Health Assessment
• A complete submission: your completed health check with its two lowest dimensions named for your next retrospective, plus the charter refresh below
• What it makes easier: the spring charter refresh and the midterm peer evaluation; the Project Retrospective team-dynamics criterion later

The assessment closes with the charter refresh: update the charter (the working agreement guide has the patterns) with what it surfaced (roles for the final term, the decision process, anything the winter postmortem changed); a change to the Definition of Done or the pull request and review rules goes in CONTRIBUTING.md.

What You Submit

The workshop’s complete submission, as its section above describes, in one PDF (Submitting Your Work); a photo of a whiteboard or sticky notes goes inside the PDF.

If your project is under NDA

Submit a sanitized version: what you did, without partner-confidential specifics. If that isn’t possible, contact the instruction team.

Rubric

Rubric: 100 points across 1 criteria

Criterion	Ratings
Workshop output100 points	Complete (100)Everything its workshop entry lists as a complete submission, about the team's own project or the team itself, whatever its quality. Incomplete (0)Not submitted, the submission is not this activity (a blank file, an unrelated document), it is missing an item its workshop entry lists, or it is not about the team's own project or the team itself.