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Providing a baseline in software process improvement education with lego scrum simulations

Published: 27 May 2018 Publication History

Abstract

A critical aspect of software process education in general and software process improvement (SPI) education in particular is to give students the chance to experience processes and issues associated with process at first hand. This is, however, often difficult in an educational setting since providing a meaningful project in which to apply a process can take away time and focus from the intended learning objectives. Instead, miniatures and simulations can be used to create an environment in which students can interact with processes directly without taking up large parts of the curriculum.
In this paper, we report on our experience of using Lego Scrum simulations in an SPI course at the Bachelor level. The simulations are used both to introduce a baseline for the students to let them experience process issues directly, create an improvement plan that addresses observed issues, and to apply and evaluate the plan in a second simulation. This allows students to engage with SPI methods practically, instead of purely theoretically, and allows the teacher to refer to the shared experience throughout the course.
The collected data shows that the approach is suitable, but that students struggle with the demand of putting an improvement plan into practice. We show which issues commonly occur in the simulations and thus allow teachers who adopt the practice to scaffold it and react accordingly, in particular to empower the students to take on responsibility for the improvement of the process.

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Cited By

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  • (2023)A Systematic Literature Review of Student Assessment Framework in Software Engineering CoursesJournal of Information Systems Engineering and Business Intelligence10.20473/jisebi.9.2.264-2759:2(264-275)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2023
  • (2023)Scrum in Practice: City Reconstruction as a Pedagogical Game ChallengeProceedings of the XXII Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality10.1145/3629479.3629480(321-331)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2023
  • (2022)One block on top of the otherProceedings of the ACM/IEEE 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering Education and Training10.1145/3510456.3514157(176-186)Online publication date: 21-May-2022
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cover image ACM Conferences
ICSE-SEET '18: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering Education and Training
May 2018
187 pages
ISBN:9781450356602
DOI:10.1145/3183377
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 27 May 2018

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Author Tags

  1. SPI
  2. scrum
  3. software engineering education
  4. software process improvement

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Cited By

View all
  • (2023)A Systematic Literature Review of Student Assessment Framework in Software Engineering CoursesJournal of Information Systems Engineering and Business Intelligence10.20473/jisebi.9.2.264-2759:2(264-275)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2023
  • (2023)Scrum in Practice: City Reconstruction as a Pedagogical Game ChallengeProceedings of the XXII Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality10.1145/3629479.3629480(321-331)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2023
  • (2022)One block on top of the otherProceedings of the ACM/IEEE 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering Education and Training10.1145/3510456.3514157(176-186)Online publication date: 21-May-2022
  • (2022)One Block on Top of the Other: Using Minetest to Teach Scrum2022 IEEE/ACM 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering Education and Training (ICSE-SEET)10.1109/ICSE-SEET55299.2022.9794186(176-186)Online publication date: May-2022
  • (2021)Learning software quality assurance with bricksProceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering: Joint Track on Software Engineering Education and Training10.1109/ICSE-SEET52601.2021.00010(11-19)Online publication date: 25-May-2021

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