ABSTRACT VIEW
SCRUM PACKAGE FOR SOFTWARE ENGINEERING EDUCATION
C. Pang
MacEwan University (CANADA)
Nowadays, software is embedded in almost all devices (e.g., car, refrigerator, kettle). Creating high-quality software is extremely important now and in the future. The process of creating high-quality software is called Software Engineering (SE). As far as I know, every undergraduate Computer Science (CS) curriculum includes SE education.

Agile is the most used SE methodology in the IT industry, and Scrum is the most popular Agile framework. Therefore, most SE courses in the CS undergraduate curriculum teach Scrum through software-developing course projects to prepare students for their careers. One challenge in teaching Scrum is its lack of a definitive definition. In the IT industry, organizations customize the Scrum framework according to their needs without restriction. Therefore, teachers must have in-depth Scrum experience to teach students how to employ Scrum when dealing with various software development challenges. Through these challenges, teachers guide students to understand the pros and cons of the Scrum framework and learn how to apply Scrum in different organizations under different situations.

Teachers having in-depth Scrum experience are essential in undergraduate SE education. However, many teachers, including instructors and teaching assistants (TAs), lack industrial Scrum experience. As a technical architect consultant in the IT industry for over 15 years, who participated in over 20 projects in more than 10 organizations, mainly using Scrum, I created a Scrum teaching package for my single-term Introduction to Software Engineering (Intro-SE) course. The package includes Scrum process templates, template instructions, common mistake descriptions, evaluation schemas, and feedback suggestions. With the package, teachers can teach Scrum professionally without industrial experience. I used the teaching package in Intro-SE for six terms through three years and enhanced the package to improve students' learning experience. I describe the package's content, usage, and benefits in this paper.

A Scrum project starts with defining a product backlog. Then, the project is split into sprints of a few weeks each. For the project, the package included a product backlog template. For the sprints, the package consists of sprint backlog template, sprint planning template, sprint task board template, sprint burndown chart template, sprint tracking template, sprint retrospective template, and sprint demo template. The package also includes detailed template evaluation schemas with feedback suggestions that enforce positive behaviors and recommend improvements. With the package, the teachers may mark students' submissions according to the industrial practices with meaningful feedback. This paper also points out significant shortcomings and downfalls of the students so that the teachers may be more aware of the learning opportunities, guide the students to learn from their mistakes, and apply remediations.

Keywords: Software Engineering, Education, Agile, Scrum.

Event: EDULEARN25
Session: Programming & Coding Education
Session time: Tuesday, 1st of July from 17:15 to 18:45
Session type: ORAL