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Developing an Agile Mindset in Software Engineering Students

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Conference

2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Portland, Oregon

Publication Date

June 23, 2024

Start Date

June 23, 2024

End Date

June 26, 2024

Conference Session

Software Engineering Division (SWED) Technical Session #1

Tagged Division

Software Engineering Division (SWED)

Page Count

12

DOI

10.18260/1-2--47156

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/47156

Download Count

101

Paper Authors

author page

Suddhasvatta Das

biography

Kevin A Gary Arizona State University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0003-0425-9928

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Dr. Gary is an Associate Professor in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence at the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University. His research interests are in agile and open-source software, software engineering in healthcare, and software engineering education. Presently he is focused on flow and quality metrics derived from agile research and applied to open-source software, and in identifying Regression Test Selection methods suitable for Agile and Lean software development.

He was a founding faculty member of the software engineering degree programs at ASU and developed the project-centric curricular implementation known as the Software Enterprise. He has served twice as program chair and led the program through multiple positive ABET accreditation visits. Kevin blends industry and academic experience to bring theoretically grounded, practice-oriented methods to the classroom.

Kevin is a member of ASEE, ACM, and IEEE.

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Abstract

The agile mindset is a set of values and principles extracted from the Agile Manifesto focused on trust, responsibility, ownership, continuous improvement, and continuous openness to learning and growing. A growing body of literature and anecdotal experiences in the gray literature suggest it is a necessary component for successful agile transformations in organizations. However, many organizations are unable to reap the full benefits of agile software engineering as they focus on agile practices only. Likewise, we postulate that the fully prepared graduate from a university software engineering program should exhibit an agile mindset, instead of merely gaining competence in agile practices. In this study, we investigate the agile mindset of university students in software engineering and working in an agile project environment as a part of a course. Two courses utilized a typical approach, teaching agile development competencies in a project-centric course. A third course extended this form of learning with additional critical inquiry activities to elevate internalization of agile principles and develop an agile mindset. A custom survey was employed and analyzed the results using standard descriptive and inferential statistics to investigate the outcomes

Das, S., & Gary, K. A. (2024, June), Developing an Agile Mindset in Software Engineering Students Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. 10.18260/1-2--47156

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