An Example of How We Teach

AMOS is our course on agile software development. Students form teams of seven people and perform a semester-long project together with an industry partner. The industry partner provides the project idea and serves as a domain expert, and we coach and ensure that the learning objectives are reached.

During the 2020 summer semester, we had eight such student projects (of team size seven). Project reports are available as demo videos. This is more than usual, which according to student feedback is because we are known for teaching well online with the associated expectation that teaching would proceed without a hick-up (which it did).

The learning objective of AMOS is to acquire the principles and practices of agile software development, in a team, as required by industry these days. All learning builds on each other and concepts taught in a given week are applied right away in the project.

Students learn from each other and from the feedback they get from industry partners regarding the domain in regular intervals. On top of this, we sit in on team meetings and provide steering feedback as to how well students are reaching the learning objectives.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic everything went online, and we therefore dropped the TEAM workshop, a one-day workshop front-loaded to the actual AMOS projects. In TEAM we introduce students to effective teamwork, including communication and conflict resolution models, using practical exercises. We therefore emphasized agile methods practices like the team contract and designing a team T-shirt to compensate for the lack of the TEAM workshop.

We put students through a steady pace of incremental learning using class quizzes, evaluating weekly technical work, and coaching and evaluating individual participation in teamwork. This way we get a comprehensive picture of student performance and can grade fairly

AMOS finished mid-July in line with our original planning. There was no need to take advantage of the extended semester run-time.

The underlying principles to our approach to teaching are discussed elsewhere. They do not only apply to the AMOS Project but to all our courses.