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Yanwu Tong

Professor Marie Webb

Ling 12, section 500

9 March 2019

How an Agile Team in Project Course Works as a Discourse Community

A very important characteristic of human beings is cooperating. Human know the power

of a group is always stronger than the power of individual, and they start to build ethnic groups

in ancients times. Although thousands of years passed, people still work in teams for some

projects that are impossible to be completed by individuals today. Agile software development

is an umbrella term for a set of frameworks and practices based on the values and principles

expressed in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and the 12 Principles behind it

(Agile 101). A team that follow these principles and rules of Agile software development is

called agile team. Agile team is a kind of ideal team and we perform it on the project course.

People in an agile team work for the exactly same goal that is usually defined before the team

is formed. Based the definition from John Swales, a famous professor of linguistics, discourse

community is a group of people shares goals or purposed and used communication to achieve

them (464). based on the definition of discourse community, agile team basically can be

determined as a discourse community. I am in an agile team named 4pm-gold-scheduler that is

built in computer science course and our main goal is to build a web application about course

schedule. For different agile teams, they have different goals but members in each team have

the same goal that is defined as the team build up. Furthermore, the agile team in project course

have more characteristics that follow the main characteristics of a discourse community and it
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can totally be defined as a discourse community.

First of all, a discourse community should have at least one common goal and all members

in this discourse community should work for the goal (471). These goals can be either small or

great and they can take either short or long time to be completed. But the main purpose should

be followed by everyone no matter what they do for this team. The main purpose for our 4pm-

gold-scheduler team is to build up a web application that allow students in the UCSB to create

multiple courses schedules for courses in the next quarter so that they can select class more

effective when the time is available. Besides, users can compare each courses schedule that

they make and select the most suitable one for them. In order to achieve the main goal of our

team, each group member should be assigned with several small works and team members can

ask help from other people in this team or some people that is outside the team such as the

professor if none of team members can solve the problems. The work that is assigned to me is

to get the course data from the website of our universities and rebuild the form of data and

upload to the database for our project. Whatever the works that assigned to every team member

are, everyone should follow the main purpose. That is totally satisfy the first characteristic of

a discourse community.

Besides a common goal, a discourse community should also have varied ways for

communication between every member and the main information that will be discussed during

communication (471-472). People in the discourse community should have a good

communication with other members so that they can achieve more easily. Besides, a good

format of discussion can improve the relation between every member an clarify works for all

people. In an agile team, the team meets on each day at the same time to bring everyone up to
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date on the information that is vital for coordination: each team members briefly describes any

"completed" contributions and any obstacles that stand in their way (“Coevolving Systems and

the Organization of Agile Software Development”). An agile team usually hold a meeting

which is decided by all group members and they will exchange all important information at the

meeting. Our team also use this main mechanism of discussion for agile team. Our regular

meeting is a special group meeting called “standup meeting”: this group meeting has a special

structure and specified topics that include: “What we have done since last meeting?”, “what

we are working on now?”, and “what difficulties we have met during working?”. Everyone in

our team will show their ideas for these three main questions and then speak out any other

information that related to the main goal. Furthermore, our team has more mechanisms for

discussion such as a tool called “Slack”. Slack is a platform for communication, you can create

a workshop on the slack and other people can join your workshop by searching the name of

your workshop and sign in with their account. In the workshop, users create as many channels

as they want, and they can focus on different topics in different channels. this is a tool for

communication that is commonly used in industry for software development. We usually

decide the place and time for group meeting and any problems that needed to work out by team.

The special group meeting and group communication tool is the mechanisms of communication

for agile team and the three main questions and discussion in Slack is the information and

feedback through these two mechanisms. These two characteristics are necessary for agile team

in project course to be considered as a real discourse community that have mechanisms of

communication among members and provides information and feedback through there these

mechanisms.
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Another very important characteristic for a discourse community is to contain at least one

genre for advancing the communication in discourse community (Swales). A discourse

community should have its own special writing genres and different styles for writing texts. In

the book Lab Girl, Jahren mentions that she had joined a pharmacy which can be considered

as a discourse community. In the pharmacy, anyone that transfer the medicine need to sign on

the list (33). This is a genre for the pharmacy to ensure the medicine goes the right place and

where it is. In our 4pm-gold-scheduler team, we have User Stories, README.md and

Acceptance Tests. Each of them follows different writing styles. For example, in the User

Stories, we need to describe the role of project user, the thing that the user can do and their

purpose. A simple User Story could be “As a UCSB students, I can use gold-scheduler

application to manage my courses for the next quarter so that I can decide the most suitable

combinations of courses I will take in the next quarter earlier.” This is the format that a User

Story must follow with. User stories is necessary for the team. It is not only a connection

between the team and the actual customers, but also a piece of words that tell all members what

they should working for. Group member will know that what they should do and what other

members will focus on through the user stories. README.md is totally different with User

Stories. It is like a guide for the web application. Customers can get the introduction,

installation steps, and web link from this file. For those different writing genres, we use in our

team, we must follow the special writing styles to make them easier to read and understand.

Besides, these special writing genres could be understood easily by those people that also build

agile teams for project even though their work is quite different from ours. Therefore, agile

team in project course satisfy the characteristic of discourse community claimed by Swales
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which is containing one or more genres to further its aims that focus on writing texts.

Despite of having special writing genres, the agile team also has some special words and

sentences that used in the conversation between team members such “CSIL”, “Gradescope”

and “DB”. When we decide the place to hold our group meeting or group working, we usually

use the word “CSIL”, which is Computer Science Instructional Lab machines. There is a CSIL

lab for students in college of engineering and other students that take engineering courses in

our university. Unlike CSIL lab is a place for students to work on their projects, “Gradescope”

is a web where students can see their scores and feedback for their homework and projects.

Moreover, “DB” means database. Database is a necessary component for projects that build in

our team and many other agile teams in project course. There are many kinds of database

platform that can be used by different agile teams, but the main key word is still the database.

With these special words that used in the agile team, the agile team in project course

demonstrates the fifth characteristic of a discourse community that having some special lexis

based on the particular genres.

The last characteristic that a discourse community must contain that is defined by Swales

is “a discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant

content and discoursal expertise.” (473). As a discourse community, there should be some level

for members in the community. In other words, compare with before entering the discourse

community, a member in discourse community should have some improvement in either

spiritual or physical after they leave the discourse community. Phill Conrad, a professor teaches

the project course in the UCSB, claims in the interview that before students enter the agile team

that formed during the project course, they should be proficient in objected-oriented
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programming at the level of CMPSC 32 (Conrad). According to professor Conrad’s words,

students who want to join the agile team in the project course must satisfy the prerequisites for

it. They must master some skills on computing and take the CMPSC 32 course that is held in

the UCSB with an acceptable grade. Otherwise, they cannot join the agile team in the project

course. After they complete the project and leave the agile team in project course, they should

have developed further their communication and teamwork skills in the context of software

development, as well as having mastered elements of the software design life cycle. Students

enter the agile teams with a fundamental requirement and leave with more skills that they can

learn during working in the agile team. This characteristic satisfies one of the requirements for

a discourse community that have a level of members – apprentices enter, experts leave.

Based on the properties of an agile team, we can figure out that an agile team in project

course has one or more goals which is usually set when the team is built; special group meeting

and communication tools for discussion; specific topics during group meeting and question and

decision that discussed in communication tools; more than one writing genres include User

Stories, README.md, and Acceptance Tests with different writing styles; many lexis used in

discussion and writing such as DB and CSIL; and a level of members that defined by their

skills. All these six characteristics can be considering as the six characteristics of discourse

community defined by John Swales. We can see the specific example from an agile team in

project course for all these characteristics and these characteristics are authenticated by the

professor Conrad, a Senior Lecturer (SOE) in the department of computer science and the

project course holder. To sum up, the agile team in the object course is a kind of discourse

community that will provide lots of benefit for not only the member in those teams, but also
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the users of the projects that are created by those agile teams in project course.
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Works Cited
Swales, John. “The Concept of Discourse Community.” Writing about Writing: A College
Reader, edited by Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011, pp.
466-479. Originally published in Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research
Settings, Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 21-32.

Conrad, Phill. “Re: Yanwu Tong” received by Yanwu Tong, 20 Feb. 2019

Jahren, Hope. Lab Girl. 1st ed., Vintage, 2017.

Agile Alliance. Web Development Company: 352 Inc, 2019, www.agilealliance.org. Accessed
20 Feb. 2019

Vidgen, Richard and Wang, Xiaofeng “Coevolving Systems and the Organization of Agile
Software Development” Information Systems Research, vol.20, no.3, Sep. 2009,
pp.355-376. JSTOR, doi:10.1287/isre.1090.0237. Accessed 20 Feb. 2019