This paper was a case study of different courses at various student levels of an undergraduate program and their experiences with Scrum. Courses directed at first-year students to the senior capstone were included. They reviewed both the measurable outcomes of the course as well as surveyed the students regarding their experiences. They found that the earlier in the program, the more mistakes the students made regarding utilizing Scrum properly. But, they found that being exposed early was important to the success in later exposures.
There are a few key takeaways for this paper. A thought-out decision needs to be made regarding what type of student the tool will target; never exposed before, has some experience, or is flexible enough to explicitly handle both situations. Additionally, the paper went into a few mistakes the students made regarding setting up the process in their earlier exposures. This could carry into the project in a few ways. The website could limit precisely how the project is set up. Alternatively, the site could provide the flexibility for the students to set it up in their way, and if it does not follow Scrum guidelines, the students could be guided to updating their setup. The former way removes any cognitive load from the student and could be more applicable to novice students. The latter method allows the students' room to make mistakes and could be more relevant to more experienced students.
Within the engineering education context, Scrum provides some advantages over traditional project management techniques:
• Rapid prototyping • Quick feedback • Incremental development • Discovery of core values which are important to customer and are not obvious at the start of the project • Decentralized project management function so that more students experience it
To this list we add the following:
• Transparency in teamwork – frequent meetings expose any weaknesses in contributions by team members • Project status understanding – frequent meetings provide all team members with a granular understanding of the status of the project
As such, we have to be careful to not add yet another learning goal to an already crowded field. Therefore, in our freshman courses, we do not insist on proper project management
Students need to run through three to five sprints prior to “getting it,” a time period which the ten-week practicum experience provides.
Team conflicts have not been an issue to date. The frequent stand-up meetings and reflective retrospective meeting, plus deeper involvement from the product owner, may account for this phenomena.
Student performance has been exceptional, both from the perspective of our industry sponsors and product owner/faculty members.