Issues and Challenges of Adopting Agile Methodologies in Software Engineering Courses

Abstract

Studies in the field of software engineering show that the problems frequently occur in the planning and managing phase rather than in the developing phase. Consequently, it is obvious that some other skills beyond programming and technical excellence are needed. However, those soft skills are not always easy to learn or acquire. Its adoption and correct usage can be very hard even for experienced software engineers, and thus students must prepare in advance and proposals from various authors have been enumerated. Human factor can accelerate, but it can also impede the acquisition of agile values due to lack of knowledge, cultural issues, resistance to change, wrong mind set and lack collaboration. Furthermore, there are some aspects that usually do not occur in real-world. Students are usually distracted with some other activities, do not have a common working place causing additional effort when "meeting" in distributed context. Literature review had been done to find possible solutions to avoid some of aforementioned issues. This paper elicits common problems mentioned in literature expanded with some issues, opinions and suggestions from authors' point of view according to authors' previous experiences of using agile methodologies in software development courses.