A Practical Approach to Teaching Agile Methodologies and Principles at Tertiary Level Using Student-Centred Activities

Abstract

This chapter presents a practical approach to better understand agile methodologies and principles in an educational context. An overview of the main agile principles is given along with agile methodologies that can be taught and applied in the classroom at tertiary level. The main objective is to train final year university students with agile practices currently used by the software industry. Apart from traditional activities such as homework, tests, assignments and lectures, practical approaches have been incorporated into the curriculum to engage students in active learning. In this context, the activities which were planned have been validated against agile practices at Infosys Ltd., a leading Indian-based IT company having a branch in Mauritius. In this chapter, the main focus is how team-based activities and student-centred group work have helped university students learn, understand and apply agile concepts such as Scrum, User Stories, Extreme Programming (XP), Lean, Kanban and Test-Driven Development (TDD).