Incorporation of Agile Development Methodology into a Capstone Software Engineering Project Course

This paper describes the author's experience in transitioning an undergraduate capstone software engineering project course from a traditional "waterfall " format to a modern agile development methodology. The agile approach replaces the sequential, and documentation-intensive, product development steps of the waterfall model--requirements analysis, system design, implementation, testing, and deployment/maintenance--with a series of short development sprints during which team members collaboratively develop and release a small set of new product features. Agile development focuses on collaborative teamwork and effective communication rather than a strictly managed and rigorously documented process and stresses continuous testing, integration and deployment rather than deferring these steps until late in the development cycle. While agile methodologies have gained considerable traction in industry, their adoption by academia has been slow due to several factors including challenges in effectively monitoring and mentoring student teams, difficulties in carrying out formative and summative evaluation of student work, and academic bias against a process sometimes regarded as non-rigorous. The author attempted to address these challenges in spring, 2014 while redesigning a long-standing capstone SE course t