How surveys, tutors, and software help to assess Scrum adoption in a classroom software engineering project

Abstract

Agile methods are best taught in a hands-on fashion in realistic projects. The main challenge in doing so is to assess whether students apply the methods correctly without requiring complete supervision throughout the entire project.This paper presents experiences from a classroom project where 38 students developed a single system using a scaled version of Scrum. Surveys helped us to identify which elements of Scrum correlated most with student satisfaction or posed the biggest challenges. These insights were augmented by a team of tutors, which accompanied main meetings throughout the project to provide feedback to the teams, and captured impressions of method application in practice. Finally, we performed a post-hoc, tool-supported analysis of collaboration artifacts to detect concrete indicators for anti-patterns in Scrum adoption.Through the combination of these techniques we were able to understand how students implemented Scrum in this course and which elements require further lecturing and tutoring in future iterations. Automated analysis of collaboration artifacts proved to be a promising addition to the development process that could potentially reduce manual efforts in future courses and allow for more concrete and targeted feedback, as well as more objective assessment.

What Agile Processes Should We Use in Software Engineering Course Projects?

“…Combining an established taxonomy with a field study, we selected three processes to augment a course design, and showed evidence that these additions improve learning outcomes without interfering with prior processes. Teaching and measuring team processes is difficult [8,22], but using tools that generate instructor-visible data, as we have done, can provide better insights into student behaviors. In the future we hope to use this data to determine whether teams that adhere more closely to the processes experience better learning outcomes, produce higher quality software artifacts, or both.…”

“…Our self-assessment surveys and checkpoints measure self-efficacy, so we use them as reasonable proxy measurements for learning outcomes. Previous studies have also shown that surveys are useful instruments for teaching software engineering processes [22].…”

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

“…At the beginning of the project, the team's Product Owners need to work together to create initial user stories for the first development sprint from interviews with the product customer. While they are guided by extensive tutoring, our experience has shown that this task of collaboration in combination with new tasks is challenging for students [54]. As a result, the distribution of responsibilities and user stories between teams can lead to duplications of user stories.…”

Scalable Team-Based Software Engineering Education via Automated Systems

“…Previous studies have explored the use of metrics in teaching software engineering courses [11] [12]. Matthies et al further summarized their metrics into a system called ScrumLint [13].…”