Learning scrum by doing real-life projects

Being Scrum the agile software development framework most commonly used in the software industry, its applicability is attracting great attention to the academia. That is why this topic is quite often included in computer science and related university programs. In this article, we present a course design of a Software Engineering course where an educational framework and an open-source agile project management tool were used to develop real-life projects by undergraduate students. During the course, continuous guidance was given by the teaching staff to facilitate the students' learning of Scrum. Results indicate that students find it easy to use the open-source tool and helpful to apply Scrum to a real-life project. However, the unavailability of the client and conflicts among the team members have negative impact on the realization of projects. The guidance given to students along the course helped identify five common issues faced by students through the learning process.