Teaching Scrum with a focus on compliance assessment

TL;DR

This paper discusses integrating Scrum into Software Engineering education through team projects and assessment methods, highlighting lessons learned over five course editions to enhance student skills in agile project management.

Contribution

It introduces a course framework that emphasizes compliance assessment in Scrum education and shares empirical insights from five iterations of the course.

Findings

Effective time management strategies identified

Team composition impacts project success

Scrum framework is applicable in academic settings

Abstract

The Scrum framework has gained widespread adoption in the industry for its emphasis on collaboration and continuous improvement. However, it has not reached a similar relevance in Software Engineering (SE) curricula. This work reports the experience of five editions of a SE course within an MSc. Degree in Computer Engineering. The course primary educational objective is to provide students with the skills to manage software development projects with Scrum. The course is based on the execution of a team project and on the definition of qualitative and quantitative means of assessment of the application of Scrum. The conduction of five editions of the course allowed us to identify several lessons learned about time budgeting and team compositions in agile student projects and its evidence of the applicability of the framework to software development courses.