Teaching Agile Software Development in a Software Engineering Course: An Empirical Study

Abstract

Agile has been successfully adopted by many software companies and it is the most popular methodology for software development in industry nowadays. However, our universities give more attention to teaching Waterfall model in related courses with a bit coverage of Agile main characteristics. In this paper, we work on the setup, execution, and results of teaching a Software Engineering course to undergraduate students with a specific focus on Agile practices, through official re-constructed lectures besides open workshops with a senior engineer from industry to follow up with students projects in parallel. This research will study its impact on students. Also, overcome the potential problems and highlight any raised side effects. In addition to improve the students’ technical and social skills, and in spite of other related works, it investigates many factors affected or have been affected by Agile and hold many significant comparisons. The results show the high satisfaction of the students through the experiment, also show a sufficient evidence to conclude that there is a significant difference in the means of improvements between the experimental and control groups in understanding software engineering and Agile methodology in specific.