“Think Before You Scrum” - An Experience Report on Daily Scrums to Aid Reflection

Project-based software engineering courses often incorporate industry practices, e.g., the “Daily Scrum” (i.e., daily stand-ups). While the main purpose of the Daily Scrum is to discuss progress and blockers, we can also utilize them as an educational tool to facilitate student engagement and reflection since reflection is a crucial aspect of experience-based learning. This paper seeks to enhance reflective practices in software engineering project courses through a pre-meeting check-in add-on to the Daily Scrum. We also aim to assess if this increases self-reflection and consequently impacts student engagement and performance. To this end, we adapted the Daily Scrum in a software engineering project course with a pre-meeting semi-guided self-reflection on a student's work. This was supported by a bespoke online tool. Effects of the reflection were analyzed from the student perspective using surveys, application usage data, formal assessment data, and observations from teaching staff. From our experiences, we observed the pre-meeting check-in was beneficial in enhancing student self-reflectivity. Quan-titative data, supported by qualitative evidence from student feedback, also suggested positive effects on student engagement and performance. Students who used pre-meeting check-ins reported increased self-reflection and showed greater levels of improvement in assessed performance. Based on our experiences we recommend incorporating regular individual self-reflection sessions in software engineering project courses.