Teaching agile versus disciplined processes

• Autores: P.N. Robillard, M. Dulipovici
• Localización: The International journal of engineering education, ISSN-e 0949-149X, Vol. 24, no. Extra 4, 2008, págs. 671-680
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Project courses are an important component of some software engineering curricula. They are capstone projects where teams ofstudents experience the various practices for developing software. Instructors play the roles of coaches in guiding the students duringthe various phases of their project. Nowadays, software development processes fall into two major paradigms. The Disciplined softwareprocess paradigm defines best practices and their relationships on the basis of roles, activities and artifacts. The Agile processparadigm, which is based on values of simplicity, communication, and feedback, uses simple practices to enable a team to tune thepractices to their unique situation. The two process paradigms have great value in general and one is likely to be more efficient than theother in any specific development project. However, it could be interesting to find out how each of these process paradigms performs inlearning environments. To achieve this we conducted an observational study in an academic environment. Six teams of four studentsdeveloped their own versions of a software product based on the same requirements. Three teams used a Disciplined process and threeteams used an Agile process. This study is based on four observations: the quality of the implementation of the requirement, the totalproject effort, the process activity effort and the product size. The data to support each of these observations are presented. In thisstudy, however, the Disciplined paradigm provides less project implementation with a better realization of quality. This study indicatesthat the more efficient approach for capstone projects for inexperienced students in software engineering would be a Disciplined processparadigm.