Measuring the Impact of Agile Coaching on Students’ Performance

Nowadays, considerable attention is paid to agile methods as a means to improve management of software development processes. The widespread use of such methods in professional contexts has encouraged their integration into software engineering training and undergraduate courses. Although several research efforts have focused on teaching Scrum through simulating a software development project, they covered only the learning of programming practices within a Scrum team. Furthermore, few studies tackle nontechnical skills other than the development practices themselves. The work presented here introduces an original Scrum-based training model enhanced with agile coaching to maximize student performance. This was validated by a case study on a capstone project in a Scrum course. This paper summarizes the positive results of introducing agile coaching, which resulted in approximately 22% more coverage of software engineering practices. In addition, a survey data showed that, compared to students who did not receive coaching, coached students gained valuable insight into the internalization of Scrum, problem solving, and guidance by means of checkpoint meetings.