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Using Agile and Active Learning in Software Development Curriculum

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Conference

2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Location

Virtual Conference

Publication Date

July 26, 2021

Start Date

July 26, 2021

End Date

July 19, 2022

Conference Session

Software Engineering Division Technical Session 1

Tagged Division

Software Engineering Division

Page Count

11

DOI

10.18260/1-2--37985

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/37985

Download Count

497

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Paper Authors

biography

Ben Tribelhorn University of Portland

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Ben Tribelhorn teaches Computer Science at the University of Portland. His research includes machine learning for chaos in Lorenz systems, dynamic obstacle avoidance algorithms for unmanned aerial vehicles, improving software engineering pedagogy, and ethical concerns in artificial intelligence.

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biography

Andrew M. Nuxoll University of Portland

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Andrew began his career as a software engineer. Lately (since 2007) he has been teaching computer science at the University of Portland. He is an active researcher in artificial general intelligence and computer science pedagogy. He also loves playing bridge and being outdoors.

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Abstract

This paper introduces a novel implementation of an agile software development process within an active learning paradigm in a semester long junior-level course for Computer Science majors. This Software Engineering course is centered around experiential learning of the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC) and applying a modified version of Scrum throughout. In order to mirror the real-world practice in a twice a week 85 minute class, we present many adjustments to Scrum for use in the classroom. We describe the implementation of the top six agile techniques used in industry (daily standup, sprint planning, retrospectives, sprint review, short iterations, planning poker) which focuses the learning experience on the most important components of agile development in addition to including top engineering practices used in industry. Additionally, we report extensions and variants for adapting this design to existing software engineering courses at other universities. Among these variants we propose adopting class-wide teams which is atypical at other universities for junior-level project courses.

Tribelhorn, B., & Nuxoll, A. M. (2021, July), Using Agile and Active Learning in Software Development Curriculum Paper presented at 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual Conference. 10.18260/1-2--37985

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