Agile practices in software development - experiences from student projects

To address the problems of traditional software development methodologies, recent years have seen the introduction of more light-weight or "agile" development processes. These processes are intended to support early and quick production of working code by structuring the development into small release cycles and focus on continual interaction between developers and customers. As these kinds of software development processes are becoming more and more popular in industry, there is a growing demand to expose Software Engineering students to agile development practices. This, however, is not a straightforward task as the corresponding practices cannot be adjusted easily to a learning environment or may even run counter to educational goals. In this paper, we discuss our experiences in introducing agile practices in student software development projects and reflect on both the benefits and drawbacks of agile processes in this setting.