How to fully utilize attachment students?

Question

From time to time, there will be student attached to our projects, i would certainly like to assign him/her many things to do so can learn more. But alot of times we are resigned to assigning stuff like documentaiton, updating of ui mockup screens etc. As problem is that is it bit hard to trust the quality of work provided by students and another thing is that they are still young and their enthusiam may not be there. How do we better utilize them such that they really cut down our workload and also in turns mean learning more stuff which will aid them in their future job opportunies?

Answer 1

How long are the students around for? When we have had students on-site for up to two weeks there was not much other then testing type work we could give them.

If the student has enthusiasm you code do some pair programming through a bug and let them write the unit tests for verifying the fix.

Answer 2

Why not assign one or more engineers as "sheperds" to the student and let them oversee their work or even better pair with them. The student will gain a good understanding of your project and real work and have a known fallback when in trouble and someone who can give provide direction. The sheperd/mentor gains a fresh perspective, and the joy of teaching.

Answer 3

Even if you don't normally do pair programming, I find that with a junior dev it is sometimes productive to have him/her do pair programming with a more experienced developer, for the following reasons:

• I wouldn't assign coding tasks to the junior developer alone, because his code would have to be closely reviewed by someone else anyway and quite probably rewritten or changed substantially.

• On the other side, how can a junior developer learn if not by programming? So, you want him participating in some way in programming tasks.

• You get some of the advantages of pair programming: the most experienced dev is less prone to make silly mistakes (even a very junior programmer can point things like 'hey, you made a typo there') and less likely to goof off checking stackoverflow.com every 10 minutes during the pair programming session.

Of course I also would rotate the junior with several seniors during the day, so they don't feel 'slowed down' or annoyed by the young guy for extended periods of time.

Answer 4

I am afraid it might sound disappointing but it is not the best idea to utilise students to cut your organisational unit workload down. Probably, if your goal is cutting workload the best thing is not to take students. Read on to understand why.

Though you haven't specified the level of work-related expertise the students possess, nor did you mention the duration of their attachment, I assume from the tone of your question that their expertise is not sufficient to hit the ground running. It is also reasonable to assume that they are not staying for longer than 2-3 months.

The essential benefits your organisation can extract even given the limited timeframe are:

1. Notice and grab talented workers before they even get to the job market. Later in their working life they are likely not to be that easily available.

2. Turn every student into your organisation salesman. Let them tell everyone how good your product is, bring you in contracts in the future or make their peers envy their work experience increasing the pool of good candidates for your company.

3. Outsiders can help cast a fresh eye on your processes, procedures, product, expose inefficiencies etc.

4. Learn from them the latest stuff taught at universities.

5. Boost your time morale: Maslow theory, "esteem needs". Even the most junior member of your team becomes somewhat more senior, since these students have yet to achieve that position.

Cutting down workload means that you'd need to find a set of tasks which is fairly independent, does not require knowledge or skills that the students do not have and needs much of your team's time to transfer. The tasks cannot be strategically important in case they cock it up, not can it be operationally important. Hence you left with some dusty requests for management reports or research and development projects.

Chances are that R&D considered to be more desired work within your organisation and if you give exclusively to students some people feelings are going to get hurt.