Teaching team work: An extreme week for first-year programmers

Abstract

Professional software development implies team work. Therefore working in a team should be an essential part in the software engineering curriculum. We use Extreme Programming (XP) as a high-discipline software development methodology to teach software engineering within a team quite early in the curriculum. This seems not easy at first sight, as XP is aimed mainly at experienced programmers. But XP is highly motivating for students if it can be applied within the framework of a real project. After their first year of programming, students at the University of Hamburg get the chance to take part in a three week project that includes one week of intensive programming. This programming week in the middle is organized following XP principles. In this paper we describe the way we adopt XP for this week, argue about the circumstances for a compact XP-like software engineering week, and reflect on the experience we made.