Use of Agile Methods in Software Engineering Education

The use of contemporary software development approaches such as agile methods is growing in widespread use throughout the world. Although some universities are starting to teach them, courses on agile methods at the undergraduate and graduate levels are still a new phenomenon. The University of Maryland University College (UMUC) adapted agile methods for its capstone course towards a master’s degree in software engineering in the Fall of 2008. Three distributed teams of five students were asked to use agile methods to build competing electronic commerce websites. With little training in agile methods, virtual teams, collaboration tools, or web design, each of the three teams completed fully functional e-commerce websites using agile methods in little more than 13 weeks. Teams who struck an optimum balance of customer collaboration, use of agile methods, and technical programming ability had better productivity and website quality.