Session 5 of 29. Two topics, about 35 minutes of talking between them. The rest of the period is questions and team time, and the teams need it — everything taught today is due back as Phase 2 at the end of week 4. The readings were set before this session, so today confirms the vocabulary rather than introducing it.

Say the shape out loud. The second half is the one that decides whether a team of six behaves like a team of six or like six people taking turns, so do not let the sprint vocabulary eat the whole session.

Acknowledge it rather than pretending the word is new. They have heard sprint, backlog and done since the launch session. The readings were due before today on purpose: this block confirms what they already read, it does not introduce it.

Keep this short and concrete. The sprint is not a concept to admire; it is the rhythm the rest of the semester runs on, and they will feel it four times.

This is the whole idea. If the date can move, everything is late and nothing is measurable — you can never tell a team that is behind from a team that is ambitious. When a sprint is in trouble the answer is always to cut scope and deliver less, working, on the day. Say that plainly; they will need it in week 6.

Ownership of the order is what makes the Client Lead role real rather than ceremonial. Expect the question "what if the team disagrees with the order" — the answer is the week 1 rule: argue it out, then commit.

The size rule is the useful half. Most first backlogs are twelve enormous items; what they need is forty small ones. Splitting is a skill and it is learned by being told the item is too big, repeatedly, which is what I will do.

Take a real story from a team in the room and write it on the board in this shape. The "so that" line is what lets you reject a feature later: if nobody can complete it, the story is decoration.

Before, not after. Criteria written after the code are a description of what was built, which is exactly the thing they cannot be. This is quizzable and it is graded in Phase 2.

Have the room fix one out loud before moving on. The pattern that helps most is given / when / then, but do not make it a required form — the requirement is that a teammate can run it, not that it matches a template.

Pause here. This is the single sentence most likely to change how a team behaves in week 6, and the whole acceptance argument later in the semester rests on it.

Point forward: a later opener returns to this and to why the Client Lead is expected to reject some work. A Client Lead who has never rejected anything is not doing the job — that lands better now than it will in week 5.

The delivery session is the forcing function. Nothing about it is a punishment; it is simply the moment the team finds out what it actually has. Teams that treat it as a presentation rather than a demonstration lose marks on the thing they spent their time on.

Walk one team's accepted problem down all four steps on the board. Doing it once in public is worth more than any amount of explanation, and every other team recognises its own project in the shape.

Keep this to one slide deliberately. Persona work is the most enjoyable part of requirements and the least load-bearing, and a team will happily spend a week on it to avoid deciding a schema.

This is the real content of the session. Everything before it was vocabulary. Ask the room how five people work on one system at the same time without standing on each other, then let the silence sit for a moment before answering.

This is the concrete failure and it should be told as a story, not as a warning. Both people did their work, on time, competently. That is what makes it persuasive — it is not a failure of effort, and effort will not prevent it.

This is the correction to how this was taught before. A separate contract artifact was one more file to write, to review and to forget, and every team produced it after the fact — which is a description of a bug, not an agreement. The schema and the criteria are written anyway, they are graded anyway, and they already hold the whole of what a boundary needs.

Point back at the failure two slides ago and name it: the screen expected customerName, the data returned customer_full_name, and the schema is where that argument is settled once. Next class is the whole schema session, so this is a pointer forward, not the teaching itself.

Have one team say a boundary out loud and turn it into two criteria on the board. Thirty seconds of writing replaces the whole contract ceremony, and it lands in the artifact that is already graded.

This is the line that justifies the whole session in an AI-assisted course. Speed is not the constraint any more — agreement is. And the agreed shape is itself the prompt: a schema and a criterion pasted in are exactly the specification either half needs, which is why writing them is not overhead on top of building, it is the first half of building.

Connect it to the individual mark without labouring it: named stories are how a student's own contribution becomes visible, and end to end is what makes the oral question at the demo answerable.

Expect alarm at the number. Defuse it: forty small stories is roughly two per person per sprint across the semester, which is exactly what has already been described. A team frightened by forty has stories that are far too large.

Do not read the whole checklist from the front today — it is written out on the course site and walked in the last lecture, and reading a partial version here is exactly how three different lists get into circulation. What today owns is the first three items: the backlog, the criteria and the split. Say that the schema and access rules come next class and that tokens come with them, so nobody thinks they are behind. The delivery is to the whole class and every team hears every other team's split, which is the cheapest teaching available.

The Definition of Done page is the one that matters most and the shortest of the three. It loads a later opener on acceptance directly, so it is worth reading twice rather than once.

All three pages are external and short. Acceptance criteria are where the boundary between two members is now written, so that page carries what the contract template used to.

Close on the first line. Any team that cannot yet say which two members share a table should stay behind — that is a five-minute conversation now and a lost sprint later.