Teaching and learning agile collaboration

Abstract

Agile methods are widely adopted in software development. They are based on agile principles that sharply contrast to traditional command-and-control management methods. Such methods emphasize the importance of highly interactive self-organizing teams and close collaboration of all stakeholders, as well as values like courage, openness and respect. However, recent studies show that graduates and undergraduates of computer science often lack the collaborative and communicative skills necessary for agile methods and, thus, are not yet well enough educated for agile development approaches. Therefore, new approaches or more adequate educational methods for teaching the necessary communication and collaboration skills need to be developed. In a recent interview study, the authors elicited specific collaboration and communication skills needed in agile teams. In this paper, we present results from this study and discuss teaching concepts for collaboration skills from both engineering and psychological points of view. We suggest an approach on how to integrate these concepts into university courses, that focuses on active learning of agile collaboration. We have started implementing the proposed concept in a software engineering course and report on the experiences we have made and on the challenges that we have encountered.