Teaching Scrum through Team-Project Work: Students' Perceptions and Teacher's Observations

In order to prepare students for the increasing use of agile methods in industry, teaching these methods is becoming an important part of the Computer Science and Software Engineering curricula. So far most of the attention has been devoted to Extreme Programming and its practices, but there is not much reported about teaching Scrum, in spite of the fact that Scrum is one of the most widespread agile methods. To fill this gap, a course was developed at the University of Ljubljana that not only teaches Scrum through a capstone project, but also serves as a study about the learnability and applicability of Scrum. This paper describes the course details and analyses students' perceptions and teachers' observations after running the course for the first time in the Spring semester of the Academic Year 2008/09. The student surveys showed that students were overwhelmingly positive about the course and confirmed the anecdotal evidence of Scrum's benefits as reported in the literature.