From Traditional to Agile Methodologies in Software Project Management Education: A Case Study

Nowadays, agile methodologies are being increasingly adopted in the software development industry, replacing traditional methodologies. In this way, software engineering courses have been following the industry, and are therefore increasingly teaching students to follow agile methodologies and practices rather than traditional ones. This paper describes and analyzes this transition in a Software Project Management course at a higher-education institution. This experiment took place over two academic years, with Waterfall being used in the first year and Scrum in the second. The Learning Outcomes in both years are the same: to gain competences in managing software projects in small teams; but the steps to reach these competences changed according to the current trends in the area. The results obtained by the students show that, by following Scrum, the students demonstrated being more capable of developing software in teams, focused on the clients, and acquired more knowledge in fundamental areas of software development.