What Agile processes should we use in software engineering course projects?

Abstract

While project-based software engineering courses aim to provide learning opportunities grounded in professional processes, it is not always possible to replicate every process in classrooms due to course constraints. Previous studies observed how students react to various processes and gave retroactive recommendations. In this study, we instead combine a field study on professional Agile (eXtreme Programming, XP) teams and an established team process taxonomy to proactively select team processes to incorporate in a project-based software engineering course. With collected knowledge from the field study, we choose three XP processes to augment the design of a mature software engineering project course. We choose processes that are 1) considered important by professionals, and 2) complete with respect to coverage of the taxonomy's main categories. We then compare the augmented course design with the original design in a case study. Our results suggest that 1) even without extra resources, adding these new processes does not interfere with learning opportunities for XP processes previously existing in the course design; 2) student teams experience similar benefits from these new processes as professional teams do, and students appreciate the usefulness and value of the processes. In other words, our approach allows instructors to make conscious choices of XP processes that improve student learning outcomes while exposing students to a more complete set of processes and thus preparing them better for professional careers. Course designers with limited resources are encouraged to use our methodology to evaluate and improve the designs of their own project-based courses.