“I’m one of the few people who really get to see a ‘before’ and ‘after’ view of the Turinglab learning platform,” Priyav ends. “It will be really interesting to see how children learn from the changes we’re making. If it ends up being as effective as we think it is, then our collective hard work will have been worth it!”
This is a BJSS delivery, so there are standards and tools that were deployed to benefit the project and to maintain our strict quality standards.
“The first thing I did when was to roll out coding standards to the code base,” said Josh. “Standards are important because they tell the developers how they must write their code instead of leaving it them to interpret themselves. With coding standards, everything is formalised.”
He added: “Some of my team have also been working on guidelines for Continuous Integration (CI). It’s a development practice that requires developers to integrate our code into a shared repository several times a day. It means that what we create is tested on an environment other than our computers.”
When asked what the delivery team was doing to improve the application, Josh described that the best applications are coded accurately. While this might sound like an obvious statement, it means that the code shouldn’t only do its job well, but it should also be also easy to add to, maintain and debug. The Turinglab delivery team is applying BJSS best practices to make sure that this is the case.
Asked what individual skill she thinks she brings most to the Turinglab delivery team, Carla answered her analytical thinking. Turinglab provides her with a great deal of data which can be analysed so she can formulate a plan for testing going forward.
In terms of testing tools, the team settled on Protractor for automation testing. “We chose it because it’s Angular,” Carla explains. “It means that everyone on the Turinglab delivery team is using the same language. We currently have more developer resources than we do testing, so it means that Matt could allocate a less busy dev to help us out when it comes to some of the automation testing.”
The team is also using JMeter for non-functional testing. “It’s something that Harrison and I have both used before. Given the tight delivery deadlines attached to this project we settled on using something that we both know (and trust!), so we don’t waste valuable time learning something completely new.”
When he was younger, Jack used a website to learn how to code, but he would have appreciated the support provided by the Turinglab learning platform.
“I think that it is one of the best things about Turinglab,” he says. “They provide coding education at a young age. The website I used was okay, but something like the Turinglab learning platform, which is far more structured would have been beneficial to me.”
Jack only has a few months left at BJSS before he returns to the University of Leeds, but he hopes to return after graduation and join the BJSS Graduate Programme. “I’ve only been here since last August, but there’s a great start-up culture at BJSS, even though there are over 700 people working here. It’s a relaxed and friendly atmosphere and we always get the job done!”
Jack also appreciates the variety of projects which IT consulting exposes technologists to. “You can’t get stuck in one technology,” he explains. “It moves so fast that what you know today will probably disappear in a few years’ time. You are constantly learning new techniques and picking up new technologies.”
Based on their experience of delivering regular client projects, Matt’s team has also demonstrated more strategic concepts for Turinglab to consider such as Continuous Integration and potentially moving some services to AWS. On top of that, the team has also introduced Turinglab to the benefits of JIRA for tracking and project managing the delivery, rather than maintaining a spreadsheet. The team is taking some of the development load away from Henry and Sam, giving them more time to focus on the expansion of the Turinglab initiative.
Matt is enjoying his time as Project Manager, and using the skills he’s learning from the Turinglab delivery to become a more rounded Tester. For example, he’s currently engaged in a great deal of analysis to make testing more logical, thereby ensuring that the project’s he’s working on are not under- or over-tested.
Over the past few months, nine Alumni from the BJSS Academy Foundation Course have been working together with 14 students and their teachers at South Craven School, helping out with BTEC Unit 22 – Developing Computer Games.
Our first task was to come up with a problem statement for the students: to design and develop a text-based adventure game using Python. We set them a list of criteria to achieve, and also pointed them towards a helpful framework that would give them the building blocks to quickly implement a basic working game. The students were invited to the BJSS Leeds Project Centre to present the problem statement to them, giving them the opportunity to see a software consultancy firm in action. We received encouraging feedback from course leaders and we were excited to see what sorts of games the students would design!
Over the next couple of months, the students began an email correspondence with their respective BJSS mentors, sharing their initial game design ideas and asking for feedback.
Earlier this month we visited the school to see how our learners were getting on. The students were enthusiastic and engaged, keen to talk through their games and describe how they solved problems that they encountered. We saw a range of ideas that came from the same brief including crime solving, defeating monsters and catching escaped ducklings!
The students continue to communicate with BJSS mentors about problems they are attempting to solve, with the mentors advising how to approach the problem in a high level context and by offering technical guidance. Later this year, the students will make their final visit to the BJSS office and present their completed games to the team. We’re all very excited to see their finished products. It has been an engaging experience for everyone involved.
