eXtreme programming at universities - an educational perspective

To address the problems of traditional software development, recent years have shown the introduction of more light-weight or "agile" development processes (eXtreme Programming being the most prominent one). These processes are intended to support early and quick production of working code by structuring the development into small release cycles and focus on continual interaction between developers and customers. As such software development processes become more popular there is a growing demand from industry to introduce agile development practices in tertiary education. This is not a straightforward task as the corresponding practices may run counter to educational goals or may not be adjusted easily to a learning environment. In this paper, we discuss some of these issues and reflect on the problems of teaching agile processes in tertiary education.