Towards Better Scrum Learning Using Learning Styles

The meshing hypothesis claims that when both teaching and learning styles are aligned, the students’ learning experience is enhanced. However, the literature fails to evidence support for the meshing hypothesis in the context of software engineering education and scrum learning. For this reason, our work aims to validate the use of strategies for teaching Scrum that fit students’ learning styles according to the Felder-Silverman model.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

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

Evaluation of team dynamic in Norwegian projects for IT students

The need for teaching realistic software development in project courses has increased in a global scale. It has always been challenges in cooperating fast-changing software technologies, development methodologies and teamwork. Moreover, such project courses need to be designed in the connection to existing theoretical courses. We performed a large-scale research on student performance in Software Engineering projects in Norwegian universities. This paper investigates four aspects of team dynamics, which are team reflection, leadership, decision making and task assignment in order to improve student learning. Data was collected from student projects in 4 years at two universities. We found that some leader's characteristics are perceived differently for female and male leaders, including the perception of leaders as skilful workers or visionaries. Leadership is still a challenging aspect to teach, and assigned leadership is probably not the best way to learn. Students is are performing well in task review, however, needs support while performing task assignment. The result also suggests that task management to be done in more fine-grained levels. It is also important to maintain an open and active discussion to facilitate effective group decision makings

Walking Through the Method Zoo: Does Higher Education Really Meet Software Industry Demands?

Software engineering educators are continually challenged by rapidly evolving concepts, technologies, and industry demands. Due to the omnipresence of software in a digitalized society, higher education institutions (HEIs) have to educate the students such that they learn how to learn, and that they are equipped with a profound basic knowledge and with latest knowledge about modern software and system development. Since industry demands change constantly, HEIs are challenged in meeting such current and future demands in a timely manner. This paper analyzes the current state of practice in software engineering education. Specifically, we want to compare contemporary education with industrial practice to understand if frameworks, methods and practices for software and system development taught at HEIs reflect industrial practice. For this, we conducted an online survey and collected information about 67 software engineering courses. Our findings show that development approaches taught at HEIs quite closely reflect industrial practice. We also found that the choice of what process to teach is sometimes driven by the wish to make a course successful. Especially when this happens for project courses, it could be beneficial to put more emphasis on building learning sequences with other courses

(MU-CTL-01-12) Towards Model Driven Game Engineering in SimSYS: Requirements for the Agile Software Development Process Game

Software Engineering (SE) and Systems Engineering (Sys) are knowledge intensive, specialized, rapidly changing disciplines; their educational infrastructure faces significant challenges including the need to rapidly, widely, and cost effectively introduce new or revised course material; encourage the broad participation of students; address changing student motivations and attitudes; support undergraduate, graduate and lifelong learning; and incorporate the skills needed by industry. Games have a reputation for being fun and engaging; more importantly immersive, requiring deep thinking and complex problem solving. We believe educational games are essential in the next generation of e-learning tools. An extensible, freely available, engaging, problem-based game platform that provides students with an interactive simulated experience closely resembling the activities performed in a (real) industry development project would transform the SE/Sys education infrastructure. Our goal is to extend the state-of-the-art research in SE/Sys education by investigating a game development platform (GDP) from an interdisciplinary perspective (education, game research, and software/systems engineering). A meta-model has been proposed to provide a rigourous foundation that integrates the three disciplines. The GDP is intended to support the semi-automated development of collections of scripted games and their execution, where each game embodies a specific set of learning objectives. The games are scripted using a template based approach. The templates integrate three approaches: use cases; storyboards; and state machines (timed, concurrent, hierarchical state machines). The specification templates capture the structure of the game (Game, Acts, Scenes, Screens, Challenges), storyline, characters (player, non-player, external), graphics, music/sound effects, rules, and so on. The instantiated templates are (manually) transformed into XML game scripts that can be loaded into the SimSYS Game Play Engine. As a game is played, the game play events are logged; they are analyzed to automatically assess a player’s accomplishments and automatically adapt the game play script. Currently, we are manually defining a collection of games. The games are being used to ensure the GDP is flexible and reliable (i.e., the prototype can load and correctly run a variety of game scripts), the ontology is comprehensive, and the templates assist in defining well-organized, modular game scripts. In this report, we present the initial part of an Agile Software Development Process game (Act I, Scenes 1 and 2) that embodies learning objectives related to SE fundamentals (requirements, architecture, testing, process); planning with Gantt charts; working with budgets; and selecting a team for an agile development project. A student player is rewarded in the game by getting hired, scoring points, or getting promoted to lead a project. The game has a variety of settings including a classroom, job fair, and a work environment with meeting rooms, cubicles, and a water cooler station. The main non-player characters include a teacher, boss, and an evil peer. In the future, semi-automated support for creating new game scripts will be explored using a wizard interface. The templates will be formally defined, supporting automated transformation into XML game scripts that can be loaded into the SimSYS Game Engine. We also plan to explore transforming the requirements into a notation that can be imported into a commercial tool that supports Statechart simulation

Rhetorics of Functionally Applicative Game Design: Designing and Testing the Project Management Game \u3ci\u3eScrummage\u3c/i\u3e

In this project, I designed and tested Scrummage, a tabletop game to teach the scrum project management system to undergraduate students. The project grew from the gaps in both academic literature and pedagogical tools for project management and collaboration in the technical communication classroom. Although the field of technical communication places significance on project management, research shows that many employers find the project management skills and knowledge of recent graduates to be under-developed. Situated in the fields of game design, game studies, project management, and technical communication, this project asks how we as educators can improve the project management learning outcomes for technical communication graduates. After conducting research into the forms of project management, I make the argument that using a game designed using vetted game design and playtesting techniques from the field of game design could be a possible solution to this problem. I argue for term “functionally applicative games” (instead of educational, serious, or transformative games) as a way to define games designed with objectives that extend beyond the gameplay itself. I develop a series of rhetorics of functionally applicative games to guide the development and design of these types of games. To demonstrate these rhetorics of functionally applicative game design, I developed Scrummage, a four-player cooperative game in which players work together to complete a project scenario using scrum project management. My project utilizes a dual methodological approach. The first set of methods--used for playtesting Scrummage--describe the process of crafting, designing, and revising Scrummage over a series of three playtesting sessions with undergraduate students. The second set of methods draw from instructional design testing schema and test the presumed learning outcomes of Scrummage in regards to scrum project management with a separate group of students. The results not only provide insight into development and testing a functionally applicative game, but also how the processes of introducing, teaching, and reviewing games as learning tools need a heuristic that can be utilized by educators wishing to incorporate them into the classroom

Project Management in Engineering Education: Providing Generation Z With Transferable Skills

Expository approaches in project management education do not seem to be engaging engineering students. Although the students acquire remarkable theoretical knowledge throughout their coursework, they lack transferable competences, such as soft skills, which are scarcely attended in the teaching of project management. Generation Z's characteristics differ from previous generations and should be considered in new project management education approaches and methods. This article reviews the project management competencies, Generation Z profile, and teaching methods trends reported in the literature. It presents a study involving 147 engineering students, through a self-report questionnaire, to explore their profile's self-awareness and compare it with the literature. A correlational study links the Generation Z's personality traits with project management soft skills. Findings reveal interesting personality characteristics of Generation Z engineering students for the project management field. However, this sample showed low recognition of their individualism, less personal relationships, and did not value their creative potential. There were also differences in Electronic, Electrical, and Computer Science engineering students, namely, lower emotional intelligence. Some highlighted traits have a significant effect on critical project management soft skills. Other soft skills were not supported in personality traits. This work suggests implications for re-think educational approaches to Generation Z engineering students.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Communication Patterns and Strategies in Software Development Communities of Practice

Some of the greatest challenges in the relatively new field of software development lie in the decidedly old technology of communication between humans. Software projects require sophisticated and varied communication skills because software developers work in a world of incomplete, imperfect information where teams evolve rapidly in response to evolving requirements and changing collaborators. While prescriptive models for software process such as Agile suggest ways of doing, in reality these codified practices must adapt to the complexities of a real workplace. Patterns, rather than rules of behavior within software process are more suitable to the varied and mutable nature of software development. Software development communities are also learning communities, attempting to sustain themselves through internal ambiguity and external changes. We study different types of software development communities to fulfill our goal of understanding how these communities implement and evolve different communication strategies to sustain themselves through change. We observe student software development projects, open source software development, and a professional, rigorously Agile software development community. We employ Wenger\u27s concept of Community of Practice to frame our understanding, especially focusing on the notions of identity, participation, reification, negotiation of meaning and trajectory of the participants of the software development communities. From these different sources, we identify the emergent themes of mentoring and knowledge management as critical for sustainable communities. Through our long running, immersive, participant observer, ethnographic study of the Agile software development community, we contribute both a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the their communication practices and depict the evolving nature of their onboarding and mentoring strategies. We share our experience of implementing such an immersive industry ethnographic study. We employ a pattern language approach to capturing, analyzing and representing our results, thereby contributing and relating to the larger bodies of work in Scrum and Organizational Patterns. This work also informs our concurrent efforts to enhance our undergraduate computer science and software engineering curriculum, exposing students to the communication challenges of real software development and help them to develop skills to meet these challenges through practice in inquiry, critique and reflection

Introducing Agile Methods in Undergraduate Curricula, a Systematic Mapping Study

Agile approaches to Software Engineering are widely used nowadays in industry and have also reached academic environments, with universities all around the world including agile related content in their programs. There are no formal studies about the current situation of Agile Software Development in Argentinian Universities. A systematic mapping study was conducted to understand the state of agile in undergraduate curricula. Results show that Agile Software Development is part of the Information Technology and Computer Science Programs and that Scrum is the most popular agile method in that context. There is little information regarding the teaching strategy used but a learningby- doing approach is used in many cases.VIII Workshop Innovación en Educación en Informática.Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informátic

IDENTIFICATION OF RIGHT LEADERSHIP STYLE FOR AGILE TEAMS

The purpose of this research is to identify trends within leadership techniques applied in agile projects that lead to project success. Certain motivation and productivity drivers need to be defined in order to understand how to evaluate key project success metrics. My research approach involved reviewing papers that studied theoretical leadership frameworks in decision-making, motivation and information sharing. The methodology applied includes creating a mock project scenario, in which two leadership styles (authoritarian vs. servant) will be tested to understand the relationship between leadership, project performance and team morale. The project will have two team leaders applying the leadership style among 4-5 members respectively. It was important to understand what were the popular notions of “effective leadership,” and how that applies to agile project settings. The results highlighted the need to be adaptive and agile leaders, by responding to different project situations, encouraging creativity and incorporating feedback from different stakeholders. Encouraging collaboration within teams through open communication channels and creating a culture of decentralization, diversity and independence is also crucial. Team and personal leadership values were shown to be inter-connected. This allowed building trust and empowering the team to create innovative solutions, and the servant model of leadership offers a good set of leadership values. As a conclusion, it is important throughout projects to align leadership goals with the project goals of scope, time and cost. Future research needs to be executed for projects across industries, especially for firms transitioning from a traditional waterfall methodology towards adopting agile/scrum processes