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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.show moreshow less

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Author: Mathias SchubanzORCiD, Claus Lewerentz
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
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