Developing Agile Skills in IT Courses: Perspectives and Progress Emre Erturk Eastern Institute of Technology eerturk@eit.ac.nz Kathryn Mac Callum Eastern Institute of Technology kmaccallum@eit.ac.nz ABSTRACT Teaching at tertiary institutions implies a responsibility to provide an experience to the students that resembles and prepares them for the professional world. Agile software and systems development methods are increasingly prevalent in IT and other companies. Furthermore, modern teaching practices involve game like and collaborative activities in the classroom. This is also in line with the agile development philosophy as agile software projects have been early adopters of active learning, communication, and team work. This paper showcases agile practices and activities that were implemented earlier this year in a New Zealand tertiary institution in two distinct IT courses, by two different lecturers. The paper outlines the motivations and innovative ways that agile practices can be implemented within an IT programme. Keywords: information technology education, agile development, agile methods, collaborative learning, group work, industry practices 1. INTRODUCTION With more organizations adopting an agile approach to software development, it has become important that students are exposed to these practices within their IT programme. Agile methods also lend themselves nicely to supporting team work within an educational course. The concepts of group work, self-management, and recognizing individual abilities are all important qualities in a tertiary programme of study. This paper describes two interesting but different ways to use agile practices in an IT degree programme at a New Zealand tertiary institution. The first case study describes how students were introduced to agile practices within a systems analysis course, while the second case study describes the adoption of the practices within a User Experience/User Interface course where agile practices were wrapped around a course assessment. The two cases had slightly different approaches as to how agile practices were adopted. The motivation in both cases was to start exposing students to practices that they may encounter in industry once they have completed their degree and to start embedding these practices into assessments to help support group work and encourage self-management. 2. LITERATURE REVIEW The Agile approach to software development has been popularized since the Agile Manifesto of 2001. Agile and related so-called lightweight methods have been in contrast with the older and structured software development methodologies. Agile may not even be considered a methodology, since it does not prescribe development phases, long term planning, and specific types of documentation. Instead, Agile consists of general principles. Scrum, a popular framework associated with Agile, suggests roles that people can play in their project teams and activities they can perform together (Cockburn, 2013). As a result of this lack of prescriptive structure (and being more subtle and industry based), Agile is often not covered in depth in systems analysis and design courses at institutions of higher education. This is confirmed by Burns’ survey of 172 systems analysis and design instructors (2011), where 93% of instructors covered either traditional waterfall or object oriented, or both, as opposed to only 7% who covered any of the other approaches including Agile. Furthermore, Scrum was covered by just 12% of the instructors. However, the concept of prototyping was taught by 80% of the instructors (Burns, 2011). Aside from prototyping, IT courses still need improvement in order to keep up with and cover agile approaches and frameworks. Although a greater coverage of the agile approach is beneficial for IT students, it is also important to understand the type of project settings that are better suited to using this approach in industry, the potential limitations of this approach, and which particular agile industry methods and activities are relatively more important for teaching within courses. In an industry survey with 2,229 respondents, Doyle et al. (2014) found that agile projects are relatively common in web development as well as for developing in-house software solutions. Furthermore, approximately one half of the agile projects in the survey were conducted in small teams of a maximum of ten members, while teams of 11-25 and teams with more than 26 were less common. Doyle et al. (2014) also found that the agile survey participants generally felt more confident about being productive and being able to deliver functionality quicker and relatively less confident about being able to create greater economic value. Furthermore, popular agile practices included daily or standup meetings, and ability of individual members to negotiate and choose which tasks to work on. These points may also have certain implications for IT lecturers. For example, agile methods may be best learned within smaller projects. Collaborating in small teams is also suitable for an academic setting, where students can complete assignments in small groups, using agile activities. This is realistic and beneficial for teaching in the New Zealand context, where 97% of enterprises have fewer than 20 employees (http://www.med.govt.nz) whose IT projects are also compact. In addition to preparing for jobs in the future, there are pedagogical and personal development reasons why agile practices in courses may be good for IT students. In their paper on agile software development methods in IT courses, Read et al. (2014) concluded that students had fun, and enjoyed a rich classroom experience. The main argument of the same paper is also very informative; agile activities help develop students’ skills in entrepreneurship and innovation. This quality assured paper appeared at the 6 th annual conference of Computing and Information Technology Research and Education New Zealand (CITRENZ2015) and the 28 h Annual Conference of the National Advisory Committee on Computing Qualifications, Queenstown, New Zealand, October 6- 9, 2015. Michael Verhaart, Amit Sarkar, Rosemarie Tomlinson and Emre Erturk (Eds).