Agile metrics for a university software engineering course

Abstract

Teaching agile software development by pairing lectures with hands-on projects has become the norm. This approach poses the problem of grading and evaluating practical project work as well as process conformance during development. Yet, few best practices exist for measuring the success of students in implementing agile practices. Most university courses rely on observations during the course or final oral exams. In this paper, we propose a set of metrics which give insights into the adherence to agile practices in teams. The metrics identify instances in development data, e.g. commits or user stories, where agile processes were not followed. The identified violations can serve as starting points for further investigation and team discussions. With contextual knowledge of the violation, the executed process or the metric itself can be refined. The metrics reflect our experiences with running a software engineering course over the last five years. They measure aspects which students frequently have issues with and that diminish process adoption and student engagement. We present the proposed metrics, which were tested in the latest course installment, alongside tutoring, lectures, and oral exams.

Beyond Surveys: Analyzing Software Development Artifacts to Assess Teaching Efforts

“…However, it is encouraging to see that the amount of lastminute commits, i.e. commits made close to the end of the iteration [38] tended to be higher in the course installments in which Kanban was employed. Scrum's iteration plan, the Sprint Backlog, contains all the work items a team intends to address in a sprint, i.e.…”

Mining for Process Improvements

“…Assessments of project data can be drawn from measurements designed for Agile software engineering best practices. Examples include code coverage over time, [4], the regularity of commits to the VCS [12] or the percentage of stories implemented using Pair Programming [4].…”

Attitudes, Beliefs, and Development Data Concerning Agile Software Development Practices

“…The survey employed during the course started from a series of common agile practices and violations thereof drawn from software engineering research. This related research deals with prevalent agile practices, such as Test-Driven Development and Collective Code Ownership [24], team meeting and collaboration best practices [25], team environment and capability [26] as well as practices that are common pitfalls for students [27]. In following the survey design of related literature [2], we chose a small number of practices to focus on.…”