Teaching agile software development competences : the agile competence pyramid
Andreas Meier, Martin Kropp · Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften digital collection (Zurich University of Applied Sciences) · 2013
Agile methodologies have come a long way over the last decade. Several recent surveys show that agile methodologies like Scrum, Extreme Programming and, more recently, Kanban have successfully been adopted by many companies to develop software. However, the same surveys show that only few of the agile practices are used and even fewer are applied consequently and thoroughly. This is to a great extent due to the lack of skilled personnel. Although teaching agile software development has drawn some attention in recent research and has been discussed in several papers, we do not yet seem to be able to “deliver” the appropriately skilled personnel. What is the reason for this, and more importantly, how can we improve the situation? In this position paper we propose a more holistic approach for teaching agile software development, in which the required agile practices and values are not only integrated theoretically but also practically applied and repeated until they become a habit to students and software engineers.