We have had many attempts by students to use agile software approaches for their final year projects but they soon give up and move to more classical approaches. According to the students, the reasons range from insufficient meetings with supervisor to inadequate experience to estimate effort.
In my personal experience, the agile methodologies are very useful for pregrade thesis, indeed, my students use Scrum and XP in their projects. In our case, the time is a critical factor for the success of their thesis. My students have 6 month for complete their thesis. Classical approaches such as RUP could be time consumers according to the amount of artifacts proposed by RUP. Best regards.
Thanks Yusniel for your encouraging answer. How do you manage the roles in scrum for example. Who plays product owner - student or supervisor? How do you manage the regular meetings ? (what frequency do you meet?) True that the enterprise level processes are an overkill for the students. They end up only saying they followed such processes (when in reality they did not). Our students follow more informal processes related to evolutionary development.
Hi Ravi, the product owner in our case is the thesis supervisor. Generally, the thesis is proposed by the supervisor, so he knows the aims or objectives of the thesis and knows the domain. Then, the supervisor writes the user stories and the students writes the code in a programming language. Of course, the students are responsible of revision of previous works in the field and write the thesis document. Related to meetings, depends of skills of the students. Some students with strong skills dont need several meetings in the week. Just one is enough. I hope to be helpful for you. Best regards.
That is very helpful. It explains to some extent our failures. In our case, although the supervisor proposes the topic, he rarely writes user stories. We expect the student to investigate the requirements. Even one meeting per week is difficult for our workload. We usually meet 5 times per semester.(although in some cases it is higher than that).
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