Teaching Scrum in Cooperation with a Software Development Company

Abstract

The increasing use of agile methods for software development creates the need for these methods to become part of the education of future computer and information science engineers. On the other hand, teaching these methods gives us an opportunity to verify individual agile concepts and their effectiveness. For that reason, project work is an appropriate and frequently used form of teaching that enables students to get acquainted with agile methods and, at the same time, provides case studies for evaluating individual agile concepts. We describe our approach to teaching the Scrum agile method, within the software technology course, in cooperation with a software development company. Students were taught through work on a real project for which a list of requirements was submitted by the company. A co-worker of this company participated throughout the teaching period playing the role of customer’s representative. During their work, students consistently used the Scrum method and at the end of each iteration they evaluated their experience by means of a questionnaire. In the article, the Scrum method is presented first, then a description of work on the project is given and finally the results of the survey are described.