A Scrum-Centric Framework for Organizing Software Engineering Academic Courses

Abstract

Teaching Scrum and other complex Software Engineering (SE) practices, methods, and tools within a regular academic course is often a challenging task because the examples shown to students and their working environment are not realistic enough. This problem is frequently tackled by organizing courses in the form of capstone projects. Unfortunately, this approach requires additional resources (e.g., more tutors, external customers, etc.) what limits the potential number of participants. As a response to this problem, we propose a Scrum-centric framework that allows combining lectures and laboratory classes with a minimalistic capstone project, all within a regular SE course. The course is organized similarly to a project run according to the Scrum guidelines. The focal point of the framework is the synchronization between the content presented during lectures and laboratory classes with the capstone project iterations (sprints). We also share our experience from 2 years of conducting Software Engineering course organized according to the framework together with the results of a cross-sectional survey assessing student perceptions of the effectiveness of the approach.