An Insight into Apprenticeships at BREDEX GmbH

This year, our trainees and dual students completed a variety of training courses and solo/duo practice projects, such as programming a calculator in Java and a dungeon crawler in JavaFX. This laid the foundation for their programming experience. At the end of the training period, there was a final team project. This involved a task planner, in which they learned about the Scrum approach in addition to some new technologies. In this short report, our trainee Nils describes his experiences and the obstacles they encountered.

The Task Planner as a Trainee Project

The project was structured so that we trainees and dual students formed the development team, while three more experienced employees filled the roles of Scrum Master (“responsible for implementing Scrum as defined in the Scrum Guide”), Product Owner (“responsible for adding value to the product during the development process and responsible for the product backlog and product goal”) and customer. The whole thing was divided into three sprints of varying lengths to counteract the rather high turnover in the development team. Three different vocational school days made communication and teamwork quite difficult.

A Project with Ups and Downs

Our initial euphoria quickly gave way to disillusionment when we realized that three of the four developers were starting the project with three weeks of vacation, meaning that the task planner was once again becoming a solo project, at least for the first four-week sprint (“a short, fixed period of time in which a Scrum team completes a specific amount of work”). In the new year, we were able to throw ourselves into the new technologies with great enthusiasm. These were React, Typescript, Java Spring Boot, and MariaDB, which were supplemented by the already familiar Java and CSS/SCSS.
The result was a well-functioning, web-based calendar application that manages and creates appointments for registered users, adds registered and external participants, and sends notifications and reminders. A special feature was certainly the voice control, which even amazed our customers.

The Final Impression of the Task Planner Project

In conclusion, it can be said that the task planner delivered a conceptually coherent project in which we trainees and dual students were able to gain a lot of new knowledge, not only technical knowledge. Particularly helpful were the concepts of pair programming, in which two developers worked on one computer, and ensembling, in which knowledge was shared within the team. The Task Planner prepared them for all future projects and gave them an insight into how collaboration works in large projects.
We wish our trainees and dual students every success in their future training.