Comparison of student experiences with plan-driven and agile methodologies

Abstract

In Fall of 2004, we offered two software engineering courses: one in plan-driven methodologies and one in agile methodologies. In these courses, the students work on large projects in teams of 14 to 16 students using variants of Team Software Process (TSP) or Extreme Programming (XP). In order to compare the students' experiences with these methodologies, the team in the plan-driven course and one of the agile teams were given the same problem statement. Throughout the semester, we measured team cohesion and individuals' attachment to the project. To measure team cohesion, we modified the Group Environment Questionnaire that has been shown to accurately reflect team cohesion in sports teams. We also developed some of our own cohesion metrics and a measure of attachment to the project. While the GEQ showed no significant difference between the teams, our measures showed higher overall cohesion in XP, but higher sub-team cohesion in TSP. At the end of the semester, we also compared the functionality of the applications the teams developed and a variety of code metrics measuring the quality of their code and its design. While the team's developed approximately the same amount of functionality, in general, the XP team's code had better metrics. The TSP team required much more code to accomplish the same functionality because, although they had a strong design, their implementation did not leverage inheritance as the design expected