Page 472 - confbook2022

The Tenth International Arab Conference on Quality Assurance in Higher Education ﻲﻟﺎﻌﻟا ﻢﯿﻠﻌﺘﻟا ةدﻮﺟ نﺎﻤﻀﻟ ﺮﺷﺎﻌﻟا ﻲﻟوﺪﻟا ﻲﺑﺮﻌﻟا ﺮﻤﺗﺆﻤﻟا

We satisfied of the experiment significant results, the good influence on the students, and the high quality products
delivered. It is also worth mentioning that two groups work on their graduation project using agile methodology.

Conclusion and Future Work:
1.13 Conclusion:
Agile is the most used methodology in software companies, so it is clear that Agile more important than just
defined with some of its characteristics in the SWE course in universities, where it is more effective and less risky to
get knowledge and behaviors in academic environment, paying attention to the teaching Agile itself should be Agile
teaching. The teacher may act negatively if not skilled enough, and external coach helps monitoring the process, that
gives more reliability and credibility to results.
Evaluations of learning outcomes and students’ satisfaction demonstrate that the course concepts well received while having fun. An important
contributions of this paper to light a methodology for teaching the SWE as an agile project based course, and to present different techniques to
enhance this methodology.

1.14 Future Work and Recommendation:

Future Work. To accommodate more students, all groups might be given same project, to easily manage and follow
them up. Or having a large project distributed between groups, which is closer to reality i.e. outsourcing.
Next times, we will focus more on games and non-functional requirements. And may develop an introduction
nd
rd
course to Agile, dedicated to 2 -year students, so in 3 -year helps to exploit the time in a better manner.

Recommendations. Other courses like: OOP and Data Structure may adopt agile project, instead of isolating SWE
teaching in separate course. Also we suggest to engage master students –who are usually professionals in IT sector-
to the experiment through the Construction Course, or elective course.

1.15 Threats to Validity:
For external validity, we are not able to include many universities to have a random sample, so it might not produce
generalizable results, due to under-representation of sample subgroups. Another limitation in conclusion validity, we
were limited to a certain subjects. We had two choices, to repeat the experiment on other years, which duplicated
time needed, but we had done a trial before, it was somehow useful guiding us for a better execution. Or to include
the CS students but we didn’t, to guarantee the homogeneity. And it still possible later.
Also, it is a human-oriented experiment, as regards internal validity, this implies limitation to the study control,
since students have distinct capabilities, skills and interests, which act as independent variable. So we try to establish
homogeneous teams, even they were internally heterogeneous which reduces limitation effect.
Regarding the construct validity, we should track students later; since it needs much effort to report they learned
such valuable thing, without seeing them at work. Furthermore, it is better to reject or accept null hypothesis of time-
to-market, by finding the velocity of each team, velocity is the result of the division of Agile story points delivered
by the number of sprints. But it has a poor fit for waterfall strategy of development.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
This research was financially supported by Palestine Technical University - Kadoorie. We thank our colleagues
from the Scientific Research Deanship. We thank the CSE department for assistance in conducting such experiment.
We would also like to show our gratitude to the external coach from the private sector; Dimensions, he greatly
improved the follow-up of projects development process.

References:
1. Devedžić, V., & Milenković, S. R. (2011). Teaching Agile Software Development: A Case Study. IEEE
Transactions on Education, 54(2), 273–278.
2. Schroeder, A., Klarl, A., Mayer, P., & Kroiss, C. (2012). Teaching agile software development through lab
courses. IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference, EDUCON, 1–10.
3. Rodriguez, G., Soria, Á., & Campo, M. (2015). Virtual Scrum: A teaching aid to introduce undergraduate
software engineering students to Scrum. Computer Applications in Engineering Education, 23(1), 147–156.
4. Cervone, H. F. (2011). Understanding agile project management methods using Scrum. OCLC Systems &
Services: International Digital Library Perspectives, 27(1), 18–22.
5. Johnson, A. M. A. (2017). Teaching Agile Methods to Software Engineering Professionals: 10~Years, 1000
Release Plans.

٤٥١