Comparative Case Study of Plan-Driven and Agile Approaches in Student Computing Projects

Plan first, execute second” and “Adapt to change as you iterate” are two paradigms that are well known in software development, as they represent disparate schools of project management: traditional and agile. Despite a long-lasting debate on prominence of each, little comparative research has been reported, particularly in the context of academic projects, where all too often a no-process approach still prevails. This paper presents an experiment that was carried out during the Spring semester of the 2018-2019 academic year at two engineering schools in Europe in order to assess the impacts of a given development method on the success of student computing undertakings. A structured, metric-based assessment scheme was applied to reveal patterns associated with the use of Plan-driven, Iterative and no-process approaches on product quality, team productivity and teamwork quality facets.