Issues and mitigation strategies when using agile industrial software development processes in student software engineering projects

In computer science education, one of the main goals for educators is to prepare the student for employment in an industrial environment. For this it is required that the students are familiar with the major development process, ideally on the example of a concrete student project. During a one-semester software development seminar the students were grouped into 7 groups with 4-5 students each and each group was assigned eXtreme Programming, SCRUM or Open Unified Process as development process. Each student was asked to keep a development diary and answer questionnaires during and at the end of the project. Each group was asked to document the changes to their development process, identified development problems, employed mitigation strategies and the project progress in form of a retrospective report. Analysis of the reports revealed common issues and mitigation strategies, which can be classified into the following: meeting organization; communication; project roles, requirements engineering, continuous tests and process adherence. The employed mitigation strategies were classified into the same categories; quantified and evaluated regarding their respective effectiveness.