Using Agile and Active Learning in Software Development Curriculum

This paper introduces a novel implementation of an agile software development process within an active learning paradigm in a semester long junior-level course for Computer Science majors. This Software Engineering course is centered around experiential learning of the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC) and applying a modified version of Scrum throughout. In order to mirror the real-world practice in a twice a week 85 minute class, we present many adjustments to Scrum for use in the classroom. We describe the implementation of the top six agile techniques used in industry (daily standup, sprint planning, retrospectives, sprint review, short iterations, planning poker) which focuses the learning experience on the most important components of agile development in addition to including top engineering practices used in industry. Additionally, we report extensions and variants for adapting this design to existing software engineering courses at other universities. Among these variants we propose adopting class-wide teams which is atypical at other universities for junior-level project courses.