Scrum2Kanban: Integrating Kanban and Scrum in a University Software Engineering Capstone Course

Using university capstone courses to teach agile software development methodologies has become commonplace, as agile methods have gained support in professional software development. This usually means students are introduced to and work with the currently most popular agile methodology: Scrum. However, as the agile methods employed in the industry change and are adapted to different contexts, university courses must follow suit. A prime example of this is the Kanban method, which has recently gathered attention in the industry. In this paper, we describe a capstone course design, which adds the hands-on learning of the lean principles advocated by Kanban into a capstone project run with Scrum. This both ensures that students are aware of recent process frameworks and ideas as well as gain a more thorough overview of how agile methods can be employed in practice. We describe the details of the course and analyze the participating students' perceptions as well as our observations. We analyze the development artifacts, created by students during the course in respect to the two different development methodologies. We further present a summary of the lessons learned as well as recommendations for future similar courses. The survey conducted at the end of the course revealed an overwhelmingly positive attitude of students towards the integration of Kanban into the course

Beyond Surveys: Analyzing Software Development Artifacts to Assess Teaching Efforts

This Innovative Practice Full Paper presents an approach of using software development artifacts to gauge student behavior and the effectiveness of changes to curriculum design. There is an ongoing need to adapt university courses to changing requirements and shifts in industry. As an educator it is therefore vital to have access to methods, with which to ascertain the effects of curriculum design changes. In this paper, we present our approach of analyzing software repositories in order to gauge student behavior during project work. We evaluate this approach in a case study of a university undergraduate software development course teaching agile development methodologies. Surveys revealed positive attitudes towards the course and the change of employed development methodology from Scrum to Kanban. However, surveys were not usable to ascertain the degree to which students had adapted their workflows and whether they had done so in accordance with course goals. Therefore, we analyzed students' software repository data, which represents information that can be collected by educators to reveal insights into learning successes and detailed student behavior. We analyze the software repositories created during the last five courses, and evaluate differences in workflows between Kanban and Scrum usage

An Additional Set of (Automated) Eyes: Chatbots for Agile Retrospectives

Recent advances in natural-language processing and data analysis allow software bots to become virtual team members, providing an additional set of automated eyes and additional perspectives for informing and supporting teamwork. In this paper, we propose employing chatbots in the domain of software development with a focus on supporting analyses and measurements of teams' project data. The software project artifacts produced by agile teams during regular development activities, e.g. commits in a version control system, represent detailed information on how a team works and collaborates. Analyses of this data are especially relevant for agile retrospective meetings, where adaptations and improvements to the executed development process are discussed. Development teams can use these measurements to track the progress of identified improvement actions over development iterations. Chatbots provide a convenient user interface for interacting with the outcomes of retrospectives and the associated measurements in a chat-based channel that is already being employed by team members.Comment: Accepted at the 1st International Workshop on Bots in Software Engineering (May 28th, 2019, Montreal, Canada), collocated with ICSE 2019 (https://botse.github.io/

UM GUIA PARA SELEÇÃO DE MÉTRICAS ÁGEIS DE GERENCIAMENTO DE PROJETOS PARA ORGANIZAÇÕES DE DESENVOLVIMENTO DE SOFTWARE

TCC(graduação) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. Centro Tecnológico. Sistemas de Informação.O processo de desenvolvimento de software evoluiu ao longo do tempo e, novas metodologias de gerenciamento de projetos surgiram objetivando maximizar o valor entregue ao cliente, bem como minimizar custos e melhorar cada vez mais a qualidade das entregas. Os métodos ágeis permitem que a entrega que até então era tipicamente tardia e representada pelo modelo cascata, seja feita em ciclos menores, acelerando o processo de validação e incrementalmente realizando a entrega de valor. Nesse contexto, as métricas ágeis têm um papel essencial, permitindo que ao longo do projeto diferentes aspectos possam ser monitorados, proporcionando insights durante o ciclo de desenvolvimento pela medição de diferentes atributos do projeto. Assim, este trabalho tem o intuito de propor um guia de métricas de gerenciamento de projetos adequadas ao desenvolvimento ágil de software, por meio do estudo da literatura, análise do estado da arte, avaliação por meio de um survey e disponibilizado em uma plataforma, útil e pertinente aos gerentes de projeto. A avaliação inicial do guia levanta primeiros indícios de que o conteúdo do guia possui usabilidade, relevância e aplicabilidade em diferentes contextos

Methods and metrics for estimating and planning agile software projects

Trabalho financiado pelo Edital DPI / DPG - UnB n° 02/2018 (Apoio à Publicação de Artigos em Anais de Eventos, resultantes de Pesquisa Científica, Tecnológica e de Inovação de servidores do Quadro da Universidade de Brasília).The nature of agile software projects is different from software projects that use traditional methodologies. Therefore, using traditional techniques of estimates of effort, time and cost can produce imprecise estimates. Several estimation techniques have been proposed by several authors and developers in recent years. This work performs a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of current estimates practices in the development of agile software and the most used size metrics as inputs for these estimates, collecting and documenting them for a future comparison of their accuracy. With the realization of SLR, it was identified that Story Point and Point of Function are the most used metrics in agile projects as the basis for estimating size, time, effort, productivity and cost. Based on these two-size metrics, it was performed a case study with the estimation of effort, time and cost for an agile project of a software factory, where the actual development values were compared with the estimates made to analyze which provided the estimates that most closely approximated the actual values that were estimated

Adoção de métricas ágeis integradas com a plataforma GITHUB

Devido à crescente demanda e complexidade dos softwares, as empresas adotam, cada vez mais, a abordagem ágil no seu processo de desenvolvimento para aumentar a produtividade, qualidade e responder rapidamente às mudanças e imprevistos do mercado. Diante dessas necessidades, faz-se necessária a utilização de ferramentas que auxiliem os gestores e as equipas de projetos a monitorizar o processo de construção de software por meio da visualização de métricas. No entanto, muitas dessas ferramentas não exibem informações confiáveis, significativas e atualizadas, o que prejudica a análise e tomada de decisões. Face a este cenário, o objetivo deste trabalho é desenvolver uma ferramenta web para a recolha e visualização de métricas ágeis para equipas de desenvolvimento de software que utilizam o GitHub para armazenamento de código e gestão de tarefas. Para que o objetivo fosse alcançado, iniciou-se o estudo com o levantamento dos requisitos necessários para a modelação da ferramenta, e posteriormente a definição da arquitetura geral. Após o desenvolvimento da ferramenta, a mesma foi testada e avaliada por utilizadores considerados relevantes no contexto ágil. Os resultados mostram que a ferramenta desenvolvida foi considerada simples, segura, com gráficos de fácil análise, apresenta informações confiáveis, com controle de acesso aos dados dos projetos dos utilizadores, útil para as equipas ágeis, capaz de fornecer métricas fundamentais e auxiliar as equipas a melhorar o seu produto e, principalmente, os seus processos de trabalho, proporcionando a melhoria contínua.Due to the growing demand and complexity of software, companies are increasingly adopting an agile approach to their development process in order to increase productivity and quality and to quickly respond to market changes and unforeseen events. Therefore, it is necessary the use of tools that help project managers and teams to monitor the software construction process through the visualization of metrics. However, many of these tools do not display reliable, meaningful and up-to-date information, which hinders analysis and decision making. Given this scenario, the present study aims to develop a web tool for the collection and visualization of agile metrics for software development teams that use GitHub for code storage and task management. The study began with the identification of the necessary requirements for modeling the tool, and subsequent definition of the general architecture. After being developed, the tool was tested and evaluated by users considered relevant in the agile context. The results showed that the tool was considered simple, secure, with easy analysis charts, with reliable information, with controlled access to user project data, useful for agile teams, capable of providing fundamental metrics and helping teams to improve their product and their work processes, providing continuous improvement