Zip Code students learn from more than just their instructors. Through partnerships with local companies, students gain industry insight from leaders in the field during our Thursday night “Meet the Experts” sessions.

Each Thursday evening, we invite lead engineers from our partner organizations to speak to students on specialized coding topics. We’ve had guests from JP Morgan Chase, Chatham Financial, Encima Group and more visit to chat about code documentation, data architecture, cutting edge frameworks and the day-to-day of being a professional developer.

Last week, we had guests from Thoughtworks deliver a workshop on Agile, a product management methodology that helps developers work quickly to deliver value while remaining open to changes.

Thoughtworks introduced our students to Agile through an interactive workshop. Three groups of six students were given an imaginary project to work on: building the next generation animal out of legos.

Students had to use Agile methodology to complete this imaginary project. Agile breaks up the product development process into stages, and during the activity students learned about requirement gathering, estimation, assigning duties, building, showcasing work and reviewing team dynamics.

These stages are repeated multiple times over the course of a product’s development and allow development teams to quickly provide value while constantly testing both their product and their workflow, always leaving room for feedback and improvement.

Our visit from Thoughtworks was a great opportunity for students to learn more about a specialized topic in software development, and each Thursday brings a new opportunity for Zip Code students to learn from software engineering leaders.