A new Standard for Doing Agile Scrum Team Work in Education

Scrum is increasingly becoming an essential product development methodology for project education in modern curricula. However, individually assessing students that work in scrum projects as applied in the professional work field remains extremely challenging until date.

In scrum, students team up in order to deliver high-quality products in projects that are directed to real business stakeholders in order to enhance professional productivity and allow for flexibility to product requirements. Our new standard adds up to this methodology in three ways.

First, we propose to represent the common language that is relevant to stakeholders, product owners and development teams in terms of epic, user story and task such that team members from different backgrounds learn to comprehend together.

Second, we propose a two-stage task allocation approach in which, first, learning outcomes for a course that are set in education designs are preliminary mapped by the lecturer to abstract, state-of-the-art, tasks that are commonly relevant in the expert domain, and, then, concrete tasks for the project at hand are placed on project scrum boards by students during scrum sprint plannings in the course run.

Third, we propose to assess scrum teams both at group and individual student level. For the individual grading, we define a novel concept of task balance that we consequently measure inside teams.

With the aid of automated tools, the standard has been successfully applied and operationalised in various course runs of our multidisciplinary master where it has proven to be effective in assigning individual grades when needed.