To Agile or not to Agile Students (With a Twist): Experience Report from a Student Project Course

Abstract

Agile software development and formal methods are seemingly on the opposite ends of the rigorousness scale. If carefully used, the can efficiently function in synergy to provide an evolutionary, iterative and tailorable process for a correct-by-construction system. In this work, we present the use of agile and formal methods in the academic context at the project course. We describe the development of the meeting scheduler – a web application, which utilised the Event-B formal method and the Vaadin framework within the Scrum development process. Our contribution includes remarks and advice for student projects regarding (i) the use of Scrum and (ii) the application of formal methods in "traditional" software development. We believe that results can be to some extent transferred to an industrial setting, where learning new technologies is involved within agile development processes.