Ship the App

A 90-minute, 4-round basic Express simulation on delivering software for a real client: slicing a minimum shippable version, trading scope, quality and the deadline openly with the client, collecting only the data a children's service needs, testing as you build, triaging bugs by severity, and the release and handoff decisions, for high-school Career and Technical Education in software and app development, capstone client projects and courses preparing Certiport IT Specialist - Software Development.

Camila Zubiate, 17, leads a fictional four-student team building a booking app for Huisache Learning Studio, a small family-owned tutoring business in East Austin, Texas, over four two-week sprints from January to the spring sign-ups of Monday 8 March 2027.

Round by round you decide what the first version must do and how the team works with the owner, who has an account and what the app asks families and how the team tests, how to answer the owner's late requests for payment and a chat and in what order to fix a bug list with a privacy bug on it, and how the app goes live and what the studio gets at handoff; at each decision point the launch and its first month are projected again with the decisions taken so far.

Each round is scored on families booking online in the first month, open bugs at launch, the team's overtime and the client's trust, with the must-haves working shown alongside; letting children under 13 create accounts without verifiable parental consent (COPPA, 16 CFR 312.5) or launching with the known privacy bug (FTC Act section 5) caps the score. English with Spanish.

An introductory simulation that assumes no prior knowledge of the subject, designed for undergraduate courses. It also works in vocational and high-school programmes and in onboarding sessions.