A Practical Approach to the Agile Development of Mobile Apps in the Classroom

Abstract

This article presents a study where two groups of university students learned the principles of the agile development of mobile applications. The participating university students built their own version of an application in Java for Android following the principles of two agile methodologies: SCRUM and Extreme Programming (XP). Each team of students was assigned either a SCRUM or XP methodology for the development of their application in two iterations. In the second iteration the requirements were intentionally modified to provoke changes in the software being developed by each team. After the completion of the development process, a questionnaire was applied, and interviews with participants were conducted. The purpose of the questionnaire and the interviews was to gain insight into the participating students’ perceptions about teamwork, the methodologies used, their personal motivation, and their attitude towards changing requirements. A Mann-Whitney test was performed on the acquired data. The results show that the team that implemented the XP methodology accepted the changing requirements more than the SCRUM team. Moreover, higher levels of participation and cooperation were observed among participants who used the XP methodology than among those who used SCRUM.