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Scrumboard - A Jira-ersatz to teach agile software development

Over the past few years, we’ve been developing a web-based tool to support students tracking their progress in an agile software development course. In this blog, I’ll explain why we moved away from professional / industry-grade tools and decided to (not) reinvent the wheel.

#teaching #agile software development #scrum

Good coding practices need an advocate inside the team (or it won't work)

A few years ago, we looked into how teams deal with the technical debt in a software engineering project course (DOI to paper). One of the main takeaway from the focus group that followed an extensive data analysis (of the evolution of the quality of the code of 8 teams) and a survey (with 25 responses, being 40-ish % of the class) is that the adoption of clean code practices seem to be strongly influenced by a charismatic and engaged “team leader”. From a literature review (to appear soon at EASE, preprint here), we observed that the same pattern, i.e. the need for strong advocates in teams, exist for automated software testing in industry context. From these two studies, I believe that “old” XP advocates actually got it right and we have failed miserably to listen to them. Therefore, we felt into the same trap as before, i.e. process rigidity and putting the process before the people (and when I say “we”, I think education and industry).

#teaching #research #code quality

Teaching about Scrum with paper

I’ll talk about how we teach about Scrum events and principles in a gamified context. First of all, the whole credit goes to Sonja Hof et al.. You may check their paper (just click on Sonja’s name, it’s a hyperref) that we modified a little and tried to adapt to fix the issues they witnessed in their experiment. One day, I actually should try to contact that team to see if they still do this tutorial and if they changed anything.

#teaching #active-learning #scrum
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