What Matters to Students - A Rationale Management Case Study in Agile Software Development
- Documenting design decisions and their rationale (Design Rationale, DR) in software development projects is vital
for supporting the comprehension of the product, product quality, and future maintenance. Although an increasing number of research publications address this topic, systematic approaches and supporting DR tools are found very rarely in practice. In software engineering education, DR is usually not well covered in teaching. The lack of suitable decision documentation is mainly an issue in agile software development. In agile approaches, documentation is regarded as less important than working products. To explore possibilities for integrating decision documentation into Scrum processes for educational software development projects, we conducted a series of eight case studies. These were part of software lab courses in three universities, i.e., BTU Cottbus, PUT Poznan, University of Stuttgart, with about 400 participants in 82 project teams. We introduced additional process elements in Scrum and developed a lightweightDocumenting design decisions and their rationale (Design Rationale, DR) in software development projects is vital
for supporting the comprehension of the product, product quality, and future maintenance. Although an increasing number of research publications address this topic, systematic approaches and supporting DR tools are found very rarely in practice. In software engineering education, DR is usually not well covered in teaching. The lack of suitable decision documentation is mainly an issue in agile software development. In agile approaches, documentation is regarded as less important than working products. To explore possibilities for integrating decision documentation into Scrum processes for educational software development projects, we conducted a series of eight case studies. These were part of software lab courses in three universities, i.e., BTU Cottbus, PUT Poznan, University of Stuttgart, with about 400 participants in 82 project teams. We introduced additional process elements in Scrum and developed a lightweight capture technique to support the decision capture.
This paper describes the case study setup and corresponding implementation and, thus, an example approach of managing
rationale in Scrum. Additionally, it presents a data analysis of the students’ most relevant decisions documented throughout the case studies. We conclude the paper with a discussion on the observations we made during the case study executions and the applicability of the approach in educational software projects.…
Author: | Mathias SchubanzORCiD, Claus Lewerentz |
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URL: | https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338533856_What_Matters_to_Students_-_A_Rationale_Management_Case_Study_in_Agile_Software_Development |
Title of the source (English): | SEUH 2020: Software Engineering im Unterricht der Hochschulen : Tagungsband des 17. Workshops "Software Engineering im Unterricht der Hochschulen" 2020$dInnsbruck, Österreich, 26.-27.02.2020 |
Publisher: | RWTH |
Place of publication: | Aachen |
Editor: | Stephan Krusche, Stefan Wagner |
Document Type: | Conference publication peer-reviewed |
Language: | English |
Year of publication: | 2020 |
Tag: | agile software development; case study; decision types; design decision; rationale management; scrum; teaching |
First Page: | 17 |
Last Page: | 26 |
Series ; volume number: | CEUR workshop proceedings ; vol 2531 |
Faculty/Chair: | Fakultät 1 MINT - Mathematik, Informatik, Physik, Elektro- und Informationstechnik / FG Praktische Informatik / Softwaresystemtechnik |