How Surveys, Tutors, and Software Help to Assess Scrum Adoption in a Classroom Software Engineering Project

TL;DR

This paper explores a multi-faceted approach using surveys, tutor feedback, and automated artifact analysis to assess and improve Scrum adoption in a classroom software engineering project involving 38 students.

Contribution

It introduces a combined methodology for assessing Scrum implementation in education, integrating surveys, tutor insights, and tool-supported artifact analysis for better feedback and evaluation.

Findings

Surveys identified key Scrum elements affecting student satisfaction.

Tutor involvement provided practical insights into method application.

Automated artifact analysis showed potential for objective assessment and targeted feedback.

Abstract

Agile methods are best taught in a hands-on fashion in realistic projects. The main challenge in doing so is to assess whether students apply the methods correctly without requiring complete supervision throughout the entire project. This paper presents experiences from a classroom project where 38 students developed a single system using a scaled version of Scrum. Surveys helped us to identify which elements of Scrum correlated most with student satisfaction or posed the biggest challenges. These insights were augmented by a team of tutors, which accompanied main meetings throughout the project to provide feedback to the teams, and captured impressions of method application in practice. Finally, we performed a post-hoc, tool-supported analysis of collaboration artifacts to detect concrete indicators for anti-patterns in Scrum adoption. Through the combination of these techniques we were able to understand how students implemented Scrum in this course and which elements require further lecturing and tutoring in future iterations. Automated analysis of collaboration artifacts proved to be a promising addition to the development process that could potentially reduce manual efforts in future courses and allow for more concrete and targeted feedback, as well as more objective assessment.