One of my other Computer Science Bsc. modules include Agile Team Development. Now let me tell you, this is not Agile Team Development, its Slow Individual Copy & Paste. What a complete load of b*ll*c*s

For starters, they said we’d be able to make our own web application that would sell items to the general public. So on Monday we set about making an app that would allow us to sync the DMU calendar with our Outlook or Gmail calendars. A lecturer gave us the go-ahead, and then on the next Thursday, the module leader said our idea would not meet the specification (despite the fact that it would indeed meet the course specification), so we decided to make a website that sells imported drinks to the general public. I acted as project lead, and directed my team members and myself on what components to work on.

I focused on the Order subsystem, and developed a functional, efficient and easy-to-use system that would allow customers to place orders comprised on multiple items. A month goes by, with fortnightly meetings with the university faculty, and I was given the all-clear with my work. Come to last week, the same lecturer looked at my work, and claimed that it was all incorrect and that I needed to do it all again. I was quite astounded and felt as though they have been misleading me with what work I needed to do, when they told me that the aim isn’t to develop my own code, but to copy & paste their code from their materials, ignoring the fact that their module materials are 10 years old, and deprecated .NET frameworks and outdated versions of Windows or Visual Studio.

I should say that the module leaders and lecturers never did much teaching, insteading opting to leave everyone stranded in the deep end. This would have been even more problematic for those who are new to programming. (Luckily, I’ve been using C# since 2012, so I’m quite familiar with .NET, ASP.NET and Visual Studio debugging.) Every thursday, there would be a meeting with the module leader, where he would reluctantly show up and proceed to tell all the students to get lost if they didn’t have any questions. I am appalled by the response to any questions we have asked as well, as they were very dismissive, rude and disrespectful to anyone who had a valid question.

I’m extremely disappointed with the way the teaching has gone on with this module, in addition to the poor infrastructure we have to deal with at university. There’s little persistence from log-in to log-in, having to enter our credentials into Visual Studio and GitHub every time we try to commit or make a small change in the code. The SQL server they expect us to use is only accessible from within the university network, so we can’t test or debug at home. All of these inconveniences aren’t even what I consider to be inconveniences anymore, they are hindrences to stable, efficient and industry-standard development that people would do nowadays. The tempalte project which I should note we HAD to use, was developed in Visual Studio 2012. It’s now 2022 and VS2022 is up and kicking. You can be sure that when the time for the module feedback questionnaire is here, I will be letting them know exactly how I feel about this module and the level of teaching they have provided. £9250 for this nonsense, what an absolute joke.

Hopefully, I will be able to complete the work at a high standard (provided they don’t turn around for a third time saying everything’s wrong again) and show them exaclty what I feel about this module, and how they could teach it better for students, so we actually get our moneys worth. But for now, until next time.