Week 5: Use-Cases

Goal

In this week student will experience the skills needed to distill raw notes into more structured and objective needs. They will also learn how to identify gaps in their understanding and how to address ambiguity in the information they have gathered.

Expected Results Before This Week

Weekly Progress Check rules

  • Be prepared to show your results at the beginning of class.
  • Presenting teams are selected randomly each week. The same team may be selected repeatedly.
  • If your team is selected and there is no relevant work recorded before the session, 3 points will be deducted. Any relevant demonstrable work avoids the deduction: the weekly score is then between 0 and +3 points, depending on quality and completeness.
  • A missing expected result can cause a point deduction only once, but you should still catch up: later work may depend on it, and these results usually contribute to the tasks required for your desired grade. More about salary for tasks

How Weekly Progress Checks work · More about penalty and bonus points

This week's expected results

  • Build a substantial collection of raw domain knowledge in your GitLab project as issues: observations about users' work, strategies, problems, workarounds, expectations, and candidate needs. Create a separate issue for each distinct finding and preserve the evidence behind it—for example an exact quotation with a link or screenshot for online sources—rather than keeping the knowledge only in your notes or heads.
  • Start organizing this raw material with a small, practical set of GitLab labels from useful aspects. For example, labels such as need, strategy, problem, source::expert, source::online, or area::ui can help you find related issues; use other labels when they are more useful for your project, but make the classification concrete enough to help you navigate the collection.
  • Keep collecting raw material rather than prematurely turning everything into polished user stories or requirements; grouping and refinement are useful, but secondary at this stage. Clearly separate evidence from your interpretation, and when something is ambiguous, generalized, or based on an assumption, record that uncertainty or a follow-up question instead of silently filling in the missing information.
Title Duration
The Assignment Manager Saga 15 minutes
What Did We Miss? 30 minutes
Fighting Ambiguity 30 minutes

Notes for tutors: 

1: The Assignment Manager Saga (15 minutes)

Why is this useful for me?

Things you learn and experience in this session will help you to solve the following tasks:

The Saga

The Novell

The morning Professor Rubric entered the lecture hall, the room felt different. He did not greet them or check attendance; he walked straight to the front, his coat brushing against the desks, and placed a battered USB stick onto the table as though it were a sacred relic.

“Students,” he said, his voice calm but heavy with portent, “today we will attempt something greater than your scattered commits and half-finished reports. We will build the Assignment Manager—a system to tame your teams, track your submissions, and make grading fair. But beware: if your requirements are flawed, this creation will turn against you.”

The air grew tense. Some students leaned forward, eyes alight with curiosity, while others sank lower in their seats, wary of what was coming. Four of them, though, felt the weight of his words settle directly on their shoulders.

Iron UML, who saw the world as a network of circles and arrows, each problem solvable if only diagrammed correctly. Captain Glossary, who despised vagueness and ambiguity, carrying her dictionary of definitions like a shield. Black Scenaria, whose relentless “what ifs” could unravel the neatest of plans. And the Prototyper, who could conjure working illusions of software out of sticky notes, sleepless nights, and sheer imagination.

They became the team.

Their first attempt was bold and immediate. Iron UML charged to the whiteboard, sketching ovals in a flurry of marker strokes: Submit Assignment, Form Team, Allocate Points. The diagram spread like a constellation across the board, neat and comforting in its symmetry. For a moment, the room felt victorious already.

Then Rubric tilted his head. “And what happens when a student vanishes before grading? Or when two tutors grade the same work?”

The silence that followed was painful. The ovals looked less like answers and more like empty portals.

Black Scenaria broke the stillness. “Drawings won’t save us. We need to tell the stories of what actually happens.”

So they began. They imagined Alice forgetting to submit, the repo crashing minutes before a demo, a teammate disappearing without a word. They played out each scene, realizing with a sinking clarity how many gaps remained in their plan. But slowly, from these fragmented stories, larger patterns began to form: not just battles but campaigns, the use cases that lay beneath the scenarios.

Yet even their stories stumbled when words betrayed them. Arguments flared: one insisted “salary points” meant guaranteed grades, another said “price” was bonus features, and a third claimed MVP was simply the lowest grade possible. The noise grew until Captain Glossary rose, notebook in hand.

“Enough,” she declared. “From today forward, we speak with one tongue. Salary is fixed points. Price is value for features. MVP means the smallest deliverable. We write it, we sign it, we keep it.”

Reluctant hands signed her glossary, even Professor Rubric scrawling his initials. For the first time, the chaos of language bent to order.

The Prototyper struck next. On her laptop, a sleek interface shimmered into life: teams forming with a click, submissions bound to GitLab links, points distributed with elegant sliders. The room gasped. It was beautiful. It was almost real.

Then Iron UML, grinning, slid every point to his own name. “Look,” he said, “I win.”

Groans and laughter erupted, but beneath it came recognition: their system was fragile. They added constraints, caps on allocations, approval steps, immutable logs. Every loophole patched revealed a requirement they had not seen before.

Weeks passed, and Rubric returned, now wearing the strange aura of a man who carried invisible stones in his hand. “Consistency,” he demanded. “No redundancy. Completeness. Modifiability. Conformance.” Each word landed like a blow. The students inspected their work against his criteria, finding cracks they had missed. They patched and refined until their flows held firm under his scrutiny.

As their project grew, they saw two mountains rising before them: one called Requirements, the other Design. Whenever they climbed one, the other shifted. Each new requirement reshaped their design; each design choice forced them to sharpen the requirement. They realized now that the peaks were not rivals but twins, rising together, impossible to climb in isolation.

And then came the Deadline Monster. It stormed through the hallway with the fury of a calendar gone mad, bellowing “Three business days before demo at 08:00!” The ground trembled beneath its weight.

The heroes fought back with their creation. Teams formed with bus-factor warnings, submissions rejected invalid links, peer allocation bound by rules and logged forever. The tutor dashboard gleamed, separating salary from price with perfect clarity.

The Monster swung its colossal calendar. Captain Glossary lifted her notebook. “All terms defined. All flows complete.” The blow rebounded. The Monster shrank, howled, and dissolved back into the ether of schedules.

Exhausted, the team collapsed on beanbags, surrounded by empty pizza boxes and the faint glow of their victory. For a moment, they believed the worst was behind them.

But Professor Rubric returned, framed by the light of running pipelines. His voice was quiet, almost gentle. “You have captured the requirements for assignments, teams, and grading,” he said. Then a smile spread across his face—the kind that always meant trouble.

“Now,” he whispered, “capture the requirements for your requirements manager.”

Groans filled the room. Yet Captain Glossary was already on her feet, notebook raised. Iron UML gripped his markers. Black Scenaria muttered fresh what-ifs under her breath. The Prototyper opened a new blank canvas.

“Avengers,” Captain Glossary said, her voice steady despite the weariness in her eyes. They all felt it then, the weight of another battle looming, the certainty that the saga was not yet done. “Assemble.”

And the story would continue.

Activities

2: What Did We Miss? (30 minutes)

Why is this useful for me?

Things you learn and experience in this session will help you to solve the following tasks:

Activities

3: Fighting Ambiguity (30 minutes)

Why is this useful for me?

Things you learn and experience in this session will help you to solve the following tasks:

Activities