Adopting industry agile practices in large-scale capstone education

Abstract

This paper presents the practice and experience in adopting an agile organizational model for a final-year capstone program in Software Engineering. The model developed is motivated by having real (and developing) software artifacts with incrementally changing team members working on a product-line. This in turn results in more sophisticated capstone student-project outcomes. The model proposed supports student mentoring and promotes, through its internal organization, leadership and personal responsibility. The students are supported by professional software engineers, up-skilling workshops, and academic supervisors who act as a personalized reporting and grading point for the team. The academic supervisors are themselves supported by a tribe leader, a faculty member who assumes overall responsibility for a product-line, and who acts as a report to an external industry client/sponsor. This paper describes the motivation for the capstone model, its adoption, and some preliminary observations.