Introducing On-site Customers in Agile Software Development Projects: An Alternative Approach to Project Work in Engineering Education

In the paper, we propose a way to enhance collaboration between schoolteachers in need of good educational content, contributing their ideas from practice, and computer science students, who participate as software developers in the engineering education projects. The paper addresses the problems we have encountered during the development of educational games. Several groups of computer science students who were developing educational gaming applications as part of their projects were lacking basic didactic skills for developing a final product, which would be valuable for use in class. Some problems arose from the fact that the teams used ad-hoc methodologies for developing their applications. To address the problem, we propose an amended agile development methodology for the presented scenario, with strong emphasis on inclusion and collaboration of schoolteachers as on-site customers. A collaboration environment was prepared for the agile teams, encouraging students and schoolteachers to work together, share ideas, and provide relevant feedback. Altogether, 48 students and 8 schoolteachers participated in the study. The interactions of schoolteachers and agile teams were assessed in different ways: through observations during workshops, by analysing activities in the collaboration environment and by monitoring the system log files. The presented collaborative environment proved a useful tool for supporting communication and cooperation between members of the agile teams, but only in the teams where the schoolteachers accepted such a way of remote communication. Just the availability of the tool was not enough to improve the collaboration; the motivation for remote communication has to come from the team members.