Organization Strategies to Increase Development Productivity discusses how to increase productivity through a student worker program. It outlines how the speaker's team at Oakland University hired and trained student workers to take on development work. Key aspects included identifying mentors, varying work tasks, setting expectations, and involving students in open source contributions. When implemented well, the student program provides hands-on learning opportunities for students and additional development capacity for the organization. One student speaker discussed his positive experience in the program, where he gained real-world skills while having a flexible work schedule around his classes.

1. Organization Strategies to Increase Development Productivity
Aaron Grant & Josh Brudnak

2. Introduction
Oakland University is a mid-sized public
university in Rochester, Michigan (not California )

3. Introduction
My Team (Enterprise Applications - Emerging Technologies)
2 full-time developers, six to seven students and 1 associate
director focused on mobile, portal, identity management,
application security, accessibility, database warehouse for
reporting, GDPR, web applications, etc.
That’s a lot of work for 3 full-time employees, hence this
presentation...

4. Introduction
What are we going to talk about?
● Ways fix your work environment and gain productivity
● Student worker program
● How we operate our program
● Automation
● Open Source
● Josh talking about his experience in our student worker program

5. My First Oakland Portal Team
I joined in 2011, at that time the OU portal was outdated, CAS
was just being implemented.
I supported of these systems with a student worker. The student
worker helped test code and do small changes. All heavy
lifting was done by full-time staff.
OU’s primary uPortal student left 2 days after I started
Also to add to the fun there were no build systems in place,
misused code repositories, limited documentations and only
some computers could be used to build certain parts of the
portal.
Image: Wired IT

6. A problem
We had a capacity problem at this point.
I was the bottleneck. How could I get mobile app
technologies developed, get a new portal running and
rewrite everything to be stable?
Luckily, I had a strong background in student
employment at my previous employer...

7. Kettering University
They are a small private institution that is a mechanical
engineering / automotive engineer powerhouse in Flint,
Michigan.
Formerly at GMI / General Motors Institute historically they
trained students to become GM employees. This required a
bootcamp of sorts where the student had to work half-time at
GM and went to college the other half.

8. Co-op / Experiential Learning
Kettering called this their Cooperative Education or Co-op
program. Later they used the term “Experiential Learning”
to describe the experience.
Experiential Learning - “Learning Through Reflection on
Doing”
Other terms it could be considered hands-on learning /
applied learning, etc.
Image: theadvocates.org

9. Experiential Learning
Kydon Holding - 8 Reasons Why Experiential Learning is the Future
● Accelerates learning
● Provides a safe learning environment
● Bridges gap between theory and practice
● Produces Demonstrated Mindset
● Increases Engagement
● Delivers Exceptional Return on Investment
● Provides Accurate Assessment Results
● Enables Personalized Learning

10. How is Experiential Learning Different from Internships?
● Mentor with help teach and guide
● Aligning work with Interests
● Experiential Learning can last years
● Students are encouraged to reflect
● Mentors and supervisors will give feedback

11. Students Can Bring More Value
● They have much more potential when you
involve them more in real world projects
● Students bring fresh ideas and different
perspectives
● They care about their school and want to make
it better
Image: Dribble.com

12. Student Program / Be a Mentor
Identify mentors in the program. It could be a senior
student or a full-time developer.
Students typically come with raw skill and need help
You need someone to know the student worker and
understand what makes them tick to be able to assign
meaningful, engaging work.

13. Student Program / Hiring (Advertise!)
Ask your students to tell all their friends and colleagues
Ask a professor that will tell their students
Print posting and put on bulletin boards
Post a link to the job in uPortal announcements. :)

14. Student Program / Hiring
Have a consistent hiring process.
Test for behavior and analytical skills.
Test for interest in programming or design (i.e. do
their hobbies align with programming, etc)
Ask for examples of their work to see how excited
they are about technology
Identify where they might fit by asking questions
about their career plan or skills they want to refine
Image: watchmecode.net

15. Student Program / Hiring
Remember you are building a team, so you need to find
students who mesh well.
Negative students will sink your ship and kill your fun
productive environment.
Hiring in pairs helps with peer learning, although if you
hire too many it can hurt the full-time staff’s productivity
as each student does require assistance and code
verification.

16. Student Program / Varying Backlog
You must have a backlog developed with
varying levels of work
You must break-up work and help identify
requirements
We’ve use Gitlab issues and boards for this
purpose and used Trello before

17. Student Program / Set the Stage
Set expectations.
Delegate and Empower.
Be flexible.

18. Student Program / Cut Your Losses
When you have a student that is not working out. Know when to cut your losses.
Generally we’ll notify the student they are not meeting our expectations and have a timeline for correcting
the issue.
There are too many other smart and good students out there that could use your opportunity to advance
their career and education.

19. Today’s Student Team (Emerging Technologies)
● 2 student portal / mobile developers
● 1 student Identity and Access Management (IAM) Developer
● Security focused student developer
● Accessibility focused student developer
● UI/UX and accessibility focused student developer

20. Success Stories
All of my former student workers have great jobs immediately after graduating.
Three worked directly for Oakland as a full-time staff member
(Brandon Powell, Erik C, Dave Derderian)
Others interned at IBM, Digital Ocean and received full-time jobs at Blue Cross Blue Shield, Quicken Loans,
Apple, GM, Chrysler, Ford, 123 Net, and Dominos (mobile app division) and more.

21. More Productivity Ideas - Automation
● GitLab
● Continuous Integration to experimental development and QA environments
● Pull requests - Forced code review by senior students and full-time staff
● Issue tracking & documentation all in one place
● Infrequently compiled items placed in Nexus - Maven Server
● Automated scans with OWASP plugins
● Hope to automate accessibility checking more this year

22. Read a Good Book (or Two?)
Getting Things Done
By David Allen
The Phoenix Project
By Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford

23. Use Open Source!
This is probably a no brainer at this conference
Open Source = Collective Intelligence
There are a lot of smart people working on like-minded issues.

24. Implement Open Source Smart
Try staying as close as base and up to date as you can. This will
help reduce complexity of upgrades, reduce your delta and help
keep your service more secure.
Push your developed features and deltas to the community.
Some software has the concept of binaries used on builds. If you
alter your installation too much, then you have to fork, build, and
maintain your own binaries. That’s a pain, so choose your
alterations carefully.

25. Open Source Communities Love Students
We’ve involved our students in Apereo mailing lists and
pull requests. We have found the community was very
welcoming, helpful and joining us in teaching our students
best practices.
Next, Josh is going to talk about his experience on our
student employment program.

26. My student employment background
Before working as a student java developer I had little experience.
I was hired in 2016 (my freshmen year) as a student java developer.
I primarily worked on Oakland University’s student portal and made occasional uPortal contributions.

27. The interview process
● I wasn’t quite sure what to expect going into my first interview for a software development job.
● The interview had several parts
● Job related questions.
● Showing the interviewers my previous programming projects.
● A written test which included a small programming challenge.
● Questioning about machine learning (in my case).

28. Student work environment
● Allows us students to work in a much different environment than a traditional internship.
● Work schedules are flexible around school.
● On the job training at the student’s level
● Most of the team members are computer science students taking the same classes.

29. Student developer work
● Work on a real world projects.
● Learn from mentors and fellow students.
● Work in an environment conducive to learning.
● Learn and apply things one would have never
learned in school.

30. Contributing to open-source as a student
‘’Education’s purpose is to
replace an empty mind with an
open one.’’
- Malcolm Forbes
● Students can gain immensely from contributing to open-
source.
○ Work with more experienced developers
○ Learn how to work with large code bases
○ Network with other contributors
○ Achieve more than paper credentials

31. What I have learned
When I started working as a student developer I had absolutely no experience working on a team of
developers.
Working on a student team enabled me to learn and gain experience in software development and
open-source contribution.
Working as a student developer has taught me much more about computer science and software
development.

32. Questions?
Aaron Grant - asgrant@oakland.edu
Josh Brudnak - joshuabrudnak@oakland.edu