Industry Agile Practices in Large-scale Capstone Projects

To give students as authentic learning experience as possible, many software-focused degrees incorporate team-based capstone projects in the final year of study. Designing capstone projects, however, is not a trivial undertaking, and a number of constraints need to be considered, especially when it comes to defining learning outcomes, choosing clients and projects, providing guidance to students, creating an effective project "support infrastructure", and measuring student outcomes. To address these challenges, we propose a novel, scalable model for managing capstone projects, called ACE, that adapts Spotify's Squads and Tribes organization to an educational setting. We present our motivation, the key components of the model, its adoption, and refer to preliminary observations.