Using Scrum for Software Engineering Class Projects Ramrao Wagh DCST, Goa University Goa, India e-mail:ramrao@unigoa.ac.in , India rswagh@unigoa.ac.in Abstract – Imparting industry relevant skills and knowledge for the graduating students in the field of Software Engineering is difficult but is necessary to make the students employable and productive right from the joining. With outdated curriculum and slow process of revision of syllabi it is difficult to achieve this objective. This paper discusses how one of the popular agile project management frameworks, Scrum can be taught and used to teach basic concepts of project management without necessitating revision of the syllabus. It also discusses the rise in motivation and interest level of students due to adoption of this approach. It also shows the flexibility of this agile approach to adapt to a situation different than a normal software development scenario in an organization. Keywords-Software Engineering Education, Agile, Scrum, Projects 1. INTRODUCTION It is a common cry of industry that the graduates coming out of Computer science courses are not directly employable and as such lot of time and resources are wasted in (re) training them on the development concepts, tools, as well as methodologies. On the other hand, teaching institutes focus mainly on imparting theoretical skills without much emphasis on practice and in majority of the cases, whatever practical components are included are also outdated and irrelevant. One common excuse often cited by the institutes and faculty members is that it is time-consuming to change or adapt the curriculum according to the needs of the industry. In the Indian context, the Bachelor in Engineering in Computer Science Engineering or Information Technology(BE(CSE or IT) and Master in Computer Applications (MCA) programmes that are accredited by All India Council for Technical Education(AICTE) are the mainstay for providing IT manpower needed for the burgeoning IT Industry of India. The standard curriculum of both these programmes includes courses on Software Engineering in the later semesters. A typical Software Engineering (SE) curriculum that is part of BE/MCA courses shows that it is highly theoretical. It aims to teach lifecycle and process concepts, requirements engineering, design, testing, maintenance, quality assurance and control and project management based on some standard text-books such as [1], [2], [3]. These books try to provide glimpses of each of this activity but fail to give any clear-cut guidance on practicing the principles that they explain nicely. Since the Software Industry is project-driven it is very much essential to teach project management in greater details but in reality, it is paid a lip service. Moreover, students are also not provided with opportunity to apply whatever little is taught to them by not offering any practical/case study component for SE courses. It is true that given the limited time available within a semester, it is difficult to apply the traditional project management approach to implement a course project. What is needed is a lightweight, adaptive approach that can be tailored to the limited time and resources available as well as that provides enough flexibility to define various project attributes and that clearly shows the project progress, facilitates team work and provides an exciting learning opportunity to the learners. This paper describes an approach where the SE and project management principles are taught using Scrum [4] as a project management framework by applying it on type of projects that are usually handled by software industry. 2. BACKGROUND MCA programme of Goa University, Goa , India was introduced in 1987 with an intake capacity of 30 students by department of Computer Science and Technology. Since then it has produced around 600 software professionals with focus on developing business applications. Its alumni work in almost all major global and national software companies. MCA is a three year, six-semester programme which was promoted all over India by Department of Electronics (DoE) of Government of India in order to fill the gap of software professionals by allowing non-engineering graduates to pursue software development. Our MCA programme offers basic problem solving and programming courses as well as the other fundamental computer science courses such as DBMS, Networks in the first four semesters. Fifth semester has a Agile India 2012 978-0-7695-4657-5/12 $26.00 © 2012 IEEE DOI 10.1109/AgileIndia.2012.17 68 Agile India 2012 978-0-7695-4657-5/12 $26.00 © 2012 IEEE DOI 10.1109/AgileIndia.2012.17 68