Grupo Alarcos · Conference paper · 2018
Improving the experience of teaching Scrum
Ricardo Pérez del Castillo, Ismael Caballero Muñoz-Reja, Moisés Rodríguez Monje
Scrum dramatically shortens the feedback loop between customer and developers as well as between requirement list and functional implementations. Scrum poses to turn small teams into self-managers of their own work. Despite the increasing importance of Scrum in the software development Industry, Academia is not providing a suitable response to meet the demand of professionals. This is because, in many cases, reference curricula do not consider Scrum with a great relevance in knowledge areas nor in time scheduled for it. Even so, Academia should be able to educate and provide software engineers with enough Scrum knowledge and skills. To collaborate to this aim, we present our efforts for improving the teaching/learning experience when dealing with time limitations: we have verified that when using a comparison strategy (regarding traditional software development methodologies like Unified Process, (UP)), students improve their learning process. To validate our results, students were assessed through a twofold assessment: (i) based on Scrum certification exams plus, and with (ii) a questionnaire based on the previously mentioned comparison (Scrum vs UP). The main conclusion raised from this investigation is that students' learning experience is really more satisfactory when Scrum concepts are introduced after a comparison with UP ones.