Interview with Rob Sabourin for McGill University undergraduates (11th March 2025)

My fifth opportunity to work with McGill University undergraduate students saw me being interviewed by Rob Sabourin again during one of his sessions of the ECSE-428-001 – Software Engineering Practice course for his Winter 2025 cohort.

I began my involvement with McGill back in February 2016 when I took part in a small group interview with some students. Since then, I’ve done interviews with Rob for his software engineering classes in April 2022, November 2022 and March 2024.

My latest interview was on the same topic as my March 2024 interview, viz. the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) based on my recent experience of being involved in a large project in the Australian federal government using this framework. Rob introduced the general ideas around SAFe and I spoke to my specific experience of using the framework in a government project context. While there are still many criticisms of this framework from the agile community, we discussed some of the beneficial aspects of it in the context of very large programs of work (and agilist Ron Jeffries has some interesting things to say about it in his post, SAFe – Good But Not Good Enough).

I enjoy being interviewed by someone as experienced and well-informed as Rob and I hope that this next generation of software engineers gained something valuable by hearing about my real-life experiences to bolster their learnings around the theory of software engineering.

I’m always willing to share my knowledge and experience, it’s very rewarding personally as well as providing an opportunity to give back – I’ve had a lot of help and encouragement along my career journey (including from Rob himself) and remain incredibly grateful for it.

(Featured image for this post by Clarissa Watson on Unsplash)