Metrics in Agile Project Courses

We believe that software engineering should be taught in a hands-on way such as through a project-based capstone course where students apply the learned concepts in a real setting. However, such a teaching format can be challenging and time-consuming for instructors. In this paper we explain how we selected and introduced a set of metrics to improve the manageability of our large multi-project capstone course. We regularly run such a course with over 100 students developing applications in 10-12 parallel projects over the course of one semester. Our approach focuses on measuring the success of three key workflows, namely Merge Management, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. We show how these metrics help the instructors to keep track of the progress of multiple projects running at the same time, enabling them to identify and react to problems early.