Driving forwards together: Introducing Scrum to manage group projects

Scrum is an agile software development process which can be used to manage group projects in any discipline by empowering team members to estimate, prioritise and assign tasks. Using Scrum in an educational context, students... [ view full abstract ]

Scrum is an agile software development process which can be used to manage group projects in any discipline by empowering team members to estimate, prioritise and assign tasks. Using Scrum in an educational context, students benefit from incremental development, quick feedback and transparency in teamwork (Bass et al., 2016). Concepts include sprints (short development cycles), backlog (prioritised list of tasks), task-board (for visually identifying current task progress) and team-based effort estimation techniques such as planning poker.

Scrumwise (http://scrumwise.com) is a professional online project management tool that supports teams using the agile methodology Scrum.  Students can use Scrumwise to plan and manage group projects including individual tasks,scheduling releases, prioritising and reporting. Scrumwise provides a transparent way to track student execution of Scrum.  

This paper reports on a project in which first year Games Development students were introduced to Scrum.  Students worked in teams of 3-4 to develop 3D models for a game environment.  Using Scrum, the teams broke down the activity into a series of smaller tasks and estimated the effort required to complete the tasks.  In Scrumwise, students filled the backlog with tasks, created sprints and identified tasks as "To Do", "In Progress" or "Done" using the virtual task-board.  

While completing the team-based assignment, students were encouraged to consider the time available, discuss and estimate the amount of effort required, track their progress and, finally, reflect and review their estimations compared to the actual time on task.  The presentation will summarise the implementation of Scrum using Scrumwise for those interested in introducing Scrum within development and design projects, or in other educational contexts.

Bass, R.B., Pejcinovic, B., Grant, J., 2016. Applying Scrum project management in ECE curriculum, in: 2016 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE). Presented at the 2016 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), pp. 1–5. doi:10.1109/FIE.2016.7757568