Teaching agile principles and software engineering concepts through real-life projects

Today employees in IT related areas are expected to know the newest technologies and to be able to apply it independently in their projects. This requires a deeper understanding and additional competences that are not taught in lectures or addressed by Project Based Learning (PBL) approaches. In this paper, an approach to teach software engineering concepts using the Scrum framework in real life projects is presented. It extends the PBL concept with respect to competences. Feedback from students, customers as well as our own experience confirm the benefits of the presented approach.