When do you consider someone to be project ready?

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Hi all,   As you may have known, one of our goals as Mendix Academy is to drive learners to be “project ready”, regardless of the types of learning content. I'm curious to hear your opinion/experience on what someone should be able to do, to be considered project ready? What's the bare minimum and what's the nice to have?
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From what I've seen, if the developers don't have prior coding experience, they need to be at least Intermediate certified (or equivalent in knowledge/skill) – if they do have a software engineering/coding background, they seem to pick it up quicker and RAD may be enough. 

 

There's definitely a large jump overall between the content of RAD and what's on a common project, since most projects have more advanced use-cases, which is why to me on average, being Intermediate certified defines readiness. 

 

In general, I'd expect them to be able to

  • develop a REST integration independently
  • understand how to use the different types of associations (references vs reference sets) properly
  • understand security (unless they're working with a more senior dev)
  • know how to use view entities in the same way one would see classes in traditional code so they can be used as “helpers” like one would in that space. 
  • Most importantly, fundamentally understanding “context” – what data is available at each level? (parent/sub-microflows, page, nested dataview/grids) and how is that data moved around to the various pieces that need it? Thinking like this can help them break down and solve most problems thrown their way. 

 

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Hi Gladys,

 

Interesting question, glad you asked.

 

For me to be project ready means to be able to join an exisiting development team with a net zero impact on its velocity. I will explain what I mean by this.

Traditionally we see that when a starting Mendix developer is added to an exisiting team, the team will see drop in velocity. This is because the new developer is not yet able to deliver value independently thus not contributing to to the teams velocity yet require support and coaching from the other team members taking time from them that they would otherwise use to develop feature resulting in a net loss.

 

If we can train starting developers to a point where they require less support and are able to deliver a small amount of value, but large enough to offset the loss in velocity from the other developers.

 

Looking at Hardy Chens comment above me and the bullet points he lists I completely agree with:

“ Most importantly, fundamentally understanding “context” – what data is available at each level? (parent/sub-microflows, page, nested dataview/grids) and how is that data moved around to the various pieces that need it? Thinking like this can help them break down and solve most problems thrown their way. “

 

To me this perfectly summarises the understanding a junior developer or trainee needs to start developing features independently. If this have this understanding they will be able to figure out the rest they need from docs.mendix.com.

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Thank so much for your views Hardy and Robin!

If I may, a quick follow-up question: what hard skills (if there are any) would you say should be part of being ‘project ready’ (e.g. REST consume, complex xpaths, etc)?

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