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Teaching Agile: addressing the conflict between project delivery and application of Agile methods

Published: 14 May 2016 Publication History

Abstract

This paper analyses the changes we have made in teaching agile methodologies, practices, and principles in four courses in order to address a specific dilemma: students need to apply agile methods in order to learn them, but when complementing our courses with applied content, we face the problem that students perceive the learning and application of agile methods as less important than delivering a finished product at the end of the course. This causes students to not apply theoretical process knowledge and therefore to not develop necessary skills associated with working with defined processes in the industry. Concretely, we report on our experience with teaching Scrum with Lego, removing formal grading requirements on the delivered product, emphasising process application in post-mortem reports, and organisational changes to support the process during supervision. These changes are analysed in the context of student satisfaction, teacher observations, and achievements of learning outcomes. We also provide an overview of the lessons learnt to help guide the design of courses on agile methodologies.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ICSE '16: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion
May 2016
946 pages
ISBN:9781450342056
DOI:10.1145/2889160
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 14 May 2016

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Author Tags

  1. Agile methodogies
  2. Scrum
  3. project-based learning
  4. software engineering education
  5. teaching

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  • (2024)LIZGAIRO: Improving learning experience through Scrum in telecommunications engineering curriculumComputer Applications in Engineering Education10.1002/cae.2276632:5Online publication date: 21-May-2024
  • (2023)Teaching students to collaborate – insights from interprofessional education developmentZeitschrift für Hochschulentwicklung10.21240/zfhe/18-03/0918:3(175-196)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2023
  • (2023)Leading the transformation: agile success factors in an Irish manufacturing companyTotal Quality Management & Business Excellence10.1080/14783363.2023.221451534:15-16(1940-1967)Online publication date: Jun-2023
  • (2022)Cost estimate in scrum project with the decision-based effort estimation techniqueSoft Computing10.1007/s00500-022-07352-w26:20(10993-11005)Online publication date: 22-Jul-2022
  • (2022)Estimation Techniques for Scrum: A Qualitative Systematic StudyInnovations in Bio-Inspired Computing and Applications10.1007/978-3-030-96299-9_77(818-829)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2022
  • (2022)Project Management Issues While Using Agile MethodologyLean and Agile Software Development10.1007/978-3-030-94238-0_12(201-214)Online publication date: 12-Jan-2022
  • (2021)The program relevance of future engineer creativity development on the basis of scientific researchVestnik of Samara State Technical University Psychological and Pedagogical Sciences10.17673/vsgtu-pps.2021.2.918:2(113-121)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2021
  • (2021)BluejayProceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering: Joint Track on Software Engineering Education and Training10.1109/ICSE-SEET52601.2021.00038(283-288)Online publication date: 25-May-2021
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  • (2021)Empirical Evaluation of Agile TeamworkQuality of Information and Communications Technology10.1007/978-3-030-85347-1_11(141-155)Online publication date: 25-Aug-2021
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