Scrum and Agile Methods

in Software Engineering Courses

Jennifer Campbell Stan Kurkovsky Chun Wai Liew
University of Toronto (moderator) Lafayette College
[email protected] Central Connecticut State University [email protected]
[email protected]
Anya Tafliovich
University of Toronto
Scarborough
[email protected]

which we teach the fundamentals of software design and give

Categories and Subject Descriptors students an opportunity to apply what they are learning in
• Software and its engineering → Agile software development.
designing and developing Java and Android applications.
• Social and professional topics → Software engineering
Students are also introduced to the basics of software engineering
education
and follow a prescribed Scrum-like software development process
Keywords as they complete a team project. Each semester, between 200 and
400 students enroll in this course.
Scrum; Agile software development; Software engineering
The software development process involves an instructor
1. SUMMARY generated project feature set, multiple software design and
Agile software development has been formally introduced in 2001 development phases, subsets of the feature set for each project
in the “agile manifesto” [4]. Agile methods are best described as phase, planning meetings, status meetings, and post-phase peer-
an amalgamation of four core principles describing lightweight and self-evaluations. These loosely correspond to key Scrum
iterative software processes: elements including product backlog, sprints, sprint backlog, sprint
 Individuals and interactions over processes and tools; planning, daily scrums, and sprint retrospective. We introduce
students to a variety of software tools to support their project,
 Working software over comprehensive documentation;
including version control (Subversion) and a fully featured IDE
 Customer collaboration over contract negotiation;
(Android Studio). We also use the CATME web tool
 Responding to change over following a plan. (www.catme.org) for team formation and team member
Over the years, a number of agile frameworks, such as Extreme evaluations.
Programming and Scrum, have evolved and matured. The For most students, this project is their first team software
underlying philosophy of Scrum recognizes that the customers development project and by introducing this Scrum-like process
often change their mind about the product they want and that the we aim to keep the multi-week multi-phase team projects on
development challenges are unpredictable by their nature. track. Exposing students to a software development process at this
Consequently, Scrum embraces the fact that the problem being stage of their academic program also allows us to foreshadow the
solved cannot be fully understood or described from the start. third-year software engineering course that involves an agile
Instead, Scrum focuses on maximizing the ability of the software development project.
development team to quickly deliver in response to emerging
requirements. 2.2 Stan Kurkovsky
The aim of this panel is to present the experiences and challenges At Central Connecticut State University students have at least two
of practicing Scrum and agile methods at a variety of computer opportunities to experience Scrum.
science programs. Students may choose to get an in-depth experience with Scrum in
a game development course, which is based on the book written
2. OUR EXPERIENCE by one of our graduates [2]. Typically, students take this course
This section describes the experience of each panelist (in immediately after Data Structures and have a limited experience
alphabetical order). with software development processes or working as a part of the
team. This course introduces students to the core principles of
2.1 Jennifer Campbell Scrum using a broad range of agile games, some of which are
At the University of Toronto, we offer a second-year course [1] in
based on those from tastycupcakes.org. Students learn about the
Scrum roles; sprints and their planning, reviews, and
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or
classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed
retrospectives; product backlog, user stories and their
for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation prioritization.
on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be
honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author(s). Copyright is held by the A few weeks into the course, student teams are ready to begin
owner/author(s). applying Scrum in a game development project lasting until the
SIGCSE'16, March 2–5, 2016, Memphis, TN, USA. end of the semester. The course is structured so that there is
ACM ISBN: 978-1-4503-3685-7/16/03.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2839509.2844664 enough time for at least three 2-week sprints. The instructor plays

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the role of the Scrum Master with all sprint planning and review support Agile development (GitHub, online project management
meetings taking place during the class time in the second half of tools, etc.), and following through with iterative development, re-
the semester. planning and re-estimation as needed, until the final product is
ready for the final presentation to the client at the end of the term.
As a part of a required formal senior Software Engineering Crucial to the success of the course are weekly deliverables and
course, all students in our program are introduced to Scrum in a 3- weekly meetings with the team TA—these keep the projects on
hour long LEGO-based simulation [5], which prepares them for track.
an agile course project that focuses on short iterations with
evolving requirements. The third course in the sequence is a fourth-year course, in which
the student teams participate in a large open-source project hosted
2.3 Chun Wai Liew on GitHub. If there is enough interest, we can elaborate on this
At Lafayette College students take a second year course in which course and the use of Agile methods in it during the panel.
we teach the fundamentals of software engineering and students
learn about the basic tools and techniques involved in developing 3. CHALLENGES
group projects [3]. This course serves two purposes in our The panelists are also planning to have an open discussion
curriculum. Firstly, it teaches the students about the software focusing on lessons learned, challenges, and their possible
development tools that they will need in the upper level courses -- solutions:
software repositories, time management/planning/scheduling
tools, weekly status and bug reporting tools. Secondly, they learn  Why should we teach Scrum/Agile?
the basics of the agile process - (1) repeated short iterations, (2)  What are the biggest obstacles to adopting Scrum/Agile
unit testing from the beginning, (3) interleaving of specification in teaching Software Engineering?
development, prototyping and design.
 How to fit Scrum process into a class schedule? (daily
For our students, this is (a) their first group development project, meetings are usually impossible)
and (b) their first "medium-sized" project. They learn how to keep
the projects on track (most of the time) and also how to coordinate  Who plays the roles of the Scrum Master and Product
their activities as a group. This experience allows us to have richer Owner?
projects in the upper level courses and also to offer a capstone
software engineering course with external clients.  Are two courses necessary to introduce Scrum/Agile?
Can the approach work if the students only have one
We also have a second software engineering course (the capstone) experience? What carries over from the first course to
where students apply the scrum/agile methodology that they have the second?
learned on a project with external (to the college) clients.
 What aspects of the Scrum/Agile process are most
2.4 Anya Tafliovich difficult for the students to master?
At the University of Toronto Scarborough, we have a sequence of  Is there a difference in teaching Scrum/Agile to
three courses that involve aspects of Agile software development, first/second year students as opposed to fourth year
to various degrees. The first in the sequence is a second-year students?
course described above. The students who complete this course
have had experience with a 6-7 weeks long team project, in which 4. REFERENCES
they follow a fairly rigidly prescribed Scrum-like simplified [1] Campbell, J. and Tafliovich, A. 2015. An experience report:
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phases), backlogs (feature lists for each phase, prescribed by the Computer Science Education (SIGCSE '15). 506-511.
instructor), and the different kinds of meetings involved.
[2] Keith, C. 2010. Agile Game Development with Scrum.
The second course in the sequence is a third-year Introduction to Addison Wesley.
Software Engineering course. In this course the students are
[3] Liew, C. W. 2005. Teaching software development skills
introduced (in lecture) to all aspects of Agile development; we
early in the curriculum through software engineering. In
look at Scrum and XP in detail. The course has a 10-week long
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release plans and iteration plans, using state-of-the-art tools that

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