Perceptions of Agile Practices: A Student Survey Grigori Melnik 1 , Frank Maurer 2 1 Department of Information and Communications Technologies Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) Calgary, Canada grigori.melnik@sait.ab.ca 2 Department of Computer Science University of Calgary Calgary, Canada maurer@cpsc.ucalgary.ca Abstract. The paper reports on the results of a recent study on student percep- tions on agile practices. The study involved forty-five students enrolled in three different academic programs (Diploma, Bachelor’s and Master’s) in two institu- tions to determine their perceptions of the use of extreme programming prac- tices in doing their design and coding assignments. Overwhelmingly, students’ experiences were positive and their opinions indicate the preference to continue to use the practices if allowed. 1 Introduction Emerging agile or lightweight software development methodologies have a great potential. According to Giga Information Group Inc., more than two-thirds of all corporate IT organizations will use some form of agile software development process within next 18 months [1]. However, so far only a small percentage of development teams have adopted an agile approach. Very often, high-profile consultants are hired to introduce agile methods into a company. These consultants usually are very tal- ented developers and/or mentors. Hence, one issue that is often discussed is if agile methods work because of their engineering and management practices or because the people who introduce them are simply very good developers. A related issue is if they simply work because they focus on things that software developers like to do (e.g. writing code, producing quality work) while de-emphasizing aspects that developers often hate (e.g. producing paper documents). The argument there is basically: if you make your development team “happy”, you will get a very productive team. Our study is looking into the later issue. Our goal was to determine the perceptions of a broad student body on agile practices: Do various kinds of students like or dislike agile practices? Are there differences based on education and experience? We believe that agile methods will only be successful in the long run if the majority of developers supports them – particularly, they need to work with average developers as this is what (more or less by definition) the average project employs.