Teaching agile software development at university level: Values, management, and craftsmanship

Agile methodologies have come a long way over the last decade. Several recent surveys show that agile methodologies like Scrum, Extreme Programming and, more recently, Kanban have been successfully adopted by many companies to develop their software. However, the same surveys show that only few of the agile practices are used and even fewer are applied consequently and thoroughly. This is to a great extent due to the lack of skilled personnel. Although teaching agile software development has drawn some attention in recent research and has been discussed in several papers, we do not yet seem to be able to “deliver” the appropriately skilled personnel. What is the reason for this, and more importantly, how can we improve the situation? In this paper we propose a more holistic approach for teaching agile software development, in which the required agile practices and values are not only integrated theoretically into our courses but also practically applied and repeated until they become a habit to our graduates. The proposed concept was realized in a new Software Engineering course held at Zurich University of Applied Sciences during 2012. The evaluation shows very encouraging results, but also leaves some challenges and problems to be solved.