Experiences Assessing Agile Practices

Agile practices are increasingly being added to software engineering curricula, notably pair programming and test-driven development. Continuous integration is less commonly included, although the procedure of short-cycle rebuilds and test of applications is common practice in industry. This paper describes a study in which computing undergraduates were given experience of a set of agile practices – iteration planning, test driven development, continuous integration, and pair programming – over a two week period. The study was designed to mimic, as far as possible, a typical small-scale industrial experience. A set of process measures was devised to assess students’ participation and performance, rather than the software they produced. This paper reports the architecture of the study, and identifies those measures successfully used to assess the students’ work with agile practices.