Week 6: Sprint 2 + Assessment Q&A

🚧Preview — this guide may still change before the session. Check back closer to your session time for the final version.

✅ Week 6 Checklist Track your progress — complete during and after this session

💬 Live Q&A Submit and upvote questions — Stefan answers live in Hour 3. Keep this open.

🤝 Book Your Checkpoint Checkpoint 1 must happen this week — book if you haven't already

📊 Assessment Overview Full grade breakdown, deadlines, and submission guide

#	Mission	Time
0	📋 Assessment orientation	First 30 min
1	🗣️ Standup + sprint planning	25 min
2	🤝 Pathfinder checkpoint	During session
3	🔬 First user sessions	Self-paced
4	⚙️ Prototype — ship something	Remaining time

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Mission 0 — Assessment orientation

No direct questions to Stefan during this block. Post to the Live Q&A instead — Stefan works through the queue live in Hour 3.

Missed the walkthrough or want to revisit it? The video covers all deliverables for the second half of semester.

What is due and when

Deliverable	Weight	Due
Smart Product Challenge video (3–4 min)	10%	April 10, 23:59 — this week
Project Brief (lock date)	5%	April 10 — freezes after this
Development Log (7 entries, Weeks 3–9)	20%	Week 11
Validation Report	10%	Week 11
Technical Documentation	15%	Week 11
Demo Day	40%	Week 10

Two deadlines this week — April 10

Smart Product Challenge video — submit to LMO by April 10, 23:59. This is 10% of your grade.

Project Brief — locks on April 10. Your group resubmits it as part of the Week 11 portfolio. Do not make changes after the lock date.

Download your templates — do this now

The Technical Documentation and Validation Report are due Week 11 — but you build them from evidence collected every week. Start the documents now so you have somewhere to put that evidence.

Document	Pages	Download
Technical Documentation	6–9 pages	⬇ Download template
Validation Report	4–6 pages	⬇ Download template

What to do right now:

1. Open both templates (links above)
2. Save copies to your team’s OneDrive folder:
   • Session[X]Group[Y]_TechnicalDoc.docx
   • Session[X]Group[Y]_ValidationReport.docx
3. Fill in the cover page on both — group number + all 7 student IDs
4. That is it for today — the sections fill themselves as you build and test

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Mission 1 — Standup + sprint planning

This is a standing ritual — every session from now until Week 9 opens the same way. Three questions each, two minutes per person:

1. What did I do since the last session?
2. What will I do in this session?
3. Any blockers?

Paper + pen works well here

Writing answers before speaking keeps the standup fast and gives quieter team members time to prepare. Pass a sheet around while people settle in — same format Stefan used last week.

15:00

2 minper person 15 minstandup 25 minplanning

▶ Start ↺ Reset

After the standup — update your Kanban board together:

• Move completed tasks to Done
• Every developer has exactly one task in Doing with their name on it
• If your sprint goal from Week 5 is not met — say so explicitly. Adjust this week’s goal now, before you start building.

Sprint planning question: By the end of this session, what will a real user be able to do that they couldn’t do last week? Write that one sentence on your Kanban board. Everything you build today should connect back to it.

💬

Live Q&A

● live

Ask → ⋯ ✓ Sent!

✓ Sent — see all questions and upvote →

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Mission 2 — Pathfinder checkpoint

Checkpoint 1 must happen by the end of this week. If you haven’t booked it yet, message your pathfinder today — slots fill up.

Not optional

The checkpoint is assessed as part of your Pathfinder relationship. Teams that skip Checkpoint 1 or arrive unprepared are flagged in the Dev Log review. It takes 15 minutes. Prepare for it properly.

What to bring:

What	Details
Kanban board	Open and current — all tasks named, all owners visible
Sprint status	One sentence: are you on track for your sprint goal?
Working prototype link	Something a user can click — even partial is fine
Validation plan	Who are you testing with? When? What are you showing them?
One question	Something you are genuinely unsure about — pathfinders are most useful when you ask directly

What your pathfinder is looking for:

They are not checking whether your product is impressive. They are checking whether your team is making decisions deliberately, tracking work, and building something testable. A team with a modest prototype and clear reasoning scores higher than a team with complex code nobody can explain.

See Checkpoint Prep for the full question list they work through.

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Mission 3 — Validation — first user sessions

Your User Researcher should have booked 2–3 sessions in Week 5. This is the week to run them.

You don’t need working code

A Figma mockup or even a paper sketch is enough for a first session. You are testing whether the problem and proposed solution make sense to a real person — not whether the code works.

How to run a session

Before:

• Pick one user story to test — just one
• Prepare 3–4 tasks (not questions) that a user would do with your feature
• Bring a way to record observations (notes on phone, shared doc)

Opening (2 min):

“Thanks for helping us. We are building [one sentence]. We want to see how you interact with what we’ve got so far — we are not testing you, we are testing our design. There are no wrong answers. Please think out loud as you go.”

During (10–15 min):

• Give them a task: “Imagine you just [context]. Show me what you would do.”
• Do not help them. Where they get stuck IS the data.
• Note: what they try first, where they pause, what they say out loud, what they skip

After (5 min):

• “Was there anything confusing?”
• “What would you expect to happen when you [the thing that failed]?”
• “Would you actually use this? Why or why not?”

What counts as a finding:

• Something a user tried that didn’t match your design
• A feature they expected that doesn’t exist
• A label or button they misread
• Something they didn’t notice at all

Record in your Dev Log

Every session produces evidence for your Validation Report. Record: who (role, not name), what you showed them, what they did, what surprised you, what you will change. One paragraph per session is enough at this stage.

💬

Live Q&A

● live

Ask → ⋯ ✓ Sent!

✓ Sent — see all questions and upvote →

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Mission 4 — Prototype — ship something

Week 6 is not a planning week — it is a building week. By the end of today, something new should be in GitHub that wasn’t there at the start.

If you’re blocked:

Blocker	What to do
Can’t agree on what to build next	Look at your acceptance criteria — pick the smallest one not yet done
AI output doesn’t work	Paste the error back in, add your stack and exact error message
Dependency missing	Use npm install or the equivalent — ask a TA if stuck on setup
Nobody on the team can code	Use a no-code/low-code tool for the prototype, then document the approach
Scope too large	Cut a Must-have to Should-have — your pathfinder will agree if you can justify it

Commit standard:

feat: user can submit a new cat feeding log entry
fix: feeding form no longer clears on validation error
docs: add acceptance criteria to feeding log section of PRD

Clear commit messages are part of your Technical Documentation. Commit links in your Dev Log are how your pathfinder sees individual contributions.

💬

Live Q&A

● live

Ask → ⋯ ✓ Sent!

✓ Sent — see all questions and upvote →

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Assessment reference

See Mission 0 at the top of this page for the full deadline table and template downloads.

The Development Log and Demo Day together are 60% of your grade. Your Dev Log is live all semester — your pathfinder reads it. There is no “write it all at the end.”

See Assessment Overview for submission format and the peer evaluation rubric.

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Before you leave

What today feeds into your grade

Checkpoint completion → Pathfinder relationship (visible in Dev Log). First user sessions → Validation Report (5+ sessions required in total, build the habit now). Commits today → Technical Documentation + individual Dev Log entry. Assessment clarity → every deliverable from here.

Four things to have done today:

• Checkpoint 1 — done or formally booked with a confirmed date
• Posted or upvoted at least one question on the Live Q&A
• Smart Product Challenge video — submitted to LMO (or recorded and ready to submit before April 10, 23:59)
• At least one validation session run — findings in your Dev Log
• At least one new commit pushed to GitHub — link in Dev Log
• Week 6 Dev Log entry written — traffic light, what shipped, who did what