Continuous Delivery of Personalized Assessment and Feedback in Agile Software Engineering Projects

In recent years, Agile development has been adopted in project practices of Software Engineering (SE) courses. However, it is a great challenge to provide timely assessment and feedback to project teams and individual students with a frequency that catches up with iterative, incremental, and cooperative software development with continuous deliveries. Conventional project reviews are mostly dependent upon instructors and teaching assistants in a manual reviewing/mentoring approach, which are simply not scalable. In this paper, we argue that agile projects warrant a "continuous delivery" of personalized assessment and feedback. To this end, we propose an online-offline combined approach and built a system upon GitLab. An online platform was built by integrating DevOps tool chains so that personalized reports and assessments are delivered automatically to the teams/students, which serve as the very efficient trigger and basis for the close and targeted offline interactions between students and TAs: daily discussion over instant messaging and weekly in person meeting. This system has been in operation since 2014 for an undergraduate SE course, with over 500 students participating in over 130 project teams in total. Our results show that such a continuous assessment/feedback delivery system is very effective in educating Agile projects in SE courses.