Students’ Perceptions on Adaptations and Workload Versus Artifacts in a Project-Based Scrum-Variant Course

Abstract

Contribution: Reporting of students’ view on the use of preparatory sprint and virtual meetings, as well as on the workload effort in combination with coding artifacts in a Scrum-variant project-based course. Background: Scrum has been adopted to a large extent in Software Engineering (SE) courses. Relevant aspects have been examined in the literature, such as the overall course experience from the side of the instructors and the students, the challenges of adapting Scrum for the classroom and training on specific roles. Intended Outcomes: To design a course that allows students to come in contact with developing projects from the industry as would be performed in a company context using Scrum. The main aim was to document aspects of the students’ experience in this context (e.g., workload view in the framework of the team), which—together with the use of objective data, i.e., development artifacts—can assist in understanding students better. Application Design: Drawing upon the previous teaching experience, a Scrum-variant in a project-based SE course was designed, examining how students perceive it in relation to the following aspects: Scrum adaptations in the classroom, workload in the team. How these compare with the actual development work performed by students is also investigated. Findings: The results from two consecutive years of teaching the course (2020 and 2021), applying quantitative analysis on the data, show that students need some time to become productive and estimate user stories correctly but are aware of their development effort within the team.