Collaboration and human factors in software development: Teaching agile methodologies based on industrial insight

Recent studies show that many companies have successfully adopted agile methodologies. In this paper the authors present results of their quantitative and qualitative studies, showing that only experienced companies apply agile collaboration practices properly. The studies also suggest that successful professional agile teams tend to use more collaboration practices and consciously live the agile values. This leads to the conclusion that applying the collaborative practices and living the agile values is difficult. Thus we educators should pay special attention to teaching these practices and values in courses on agile software development. This paper presents how agile collaboration is being taught in the classroom in a fourth semester software engineering module and explains the underlying assumptions. We use an agile coaching game as introduction to Scrum and discuss the mechanics of agile teams in the classroom. We present the setup of a hands-on agile student project with large student teams and the observations we made. Last but not least, we show and discuss how modern online collaboration tools act as enablers for agile collaboration in the classroom.