Impact of Key Scrum Role Locations in Student Distributed Software Development Projects

Employing an agile development methodology, particularly Scrum, in a distributed student project setting is challenging for both teachers and involved students. Allowing distributed student teams to self-organize and assign key Scrum roles using various strategies, specifically regarding the locations of students taking on key roles, increases the complexity of such projects. In addition, the interaction of the Project Owner role with the project customer, which occurs outside the distributed student team, adds a new dimension to this problem. This paper investigates the impact of various key role assignment strategies, and their interactions, on the performance of distributed student projects. Furthermore, we investigate the intensity of collaboration within the distributed team and between key project roles, as well as their impact on project performance. We analyzed data collected on 37 distributed student projects conducted over the course of eight academic years. The results reveal that letting students assign key project roles regardless of their location in the distributed team has no significant impact on the quality of project outcomes. However, a deeper analysis uncovers that more educationally desirable assignments of those roles exist; favoring increased collaboration intensity within distributed student teams.