Reflections on Agile Software Development: A Conversion Master Case study

This research to practice paper presents a reflective study showing the observations of the teaching teams and the practices during industrial projects for the Master of Software Development (MSwDev) program at Victoria University of Wellington (VUW), New Zealand. It is a conversion master program that helps the students to acquire specific skills to be ready for the transition to the software development industry, including the ability to work in an Agile team. Software development projects supported by industrial partners are an excellent means to evaluate the technical capacity of the students and the required skills. This reflective paper describes the evolution of an industry-sourced problem-based agile student project, which over three successive years, has included students from three different cohorts (User Experience (UX), Business Analysts (BA), and Software Developers (SwDev)). This year, a collaboration between different cohorts was not possible. Thus only software development students formed the agile teams.This paper describes and reflects on the teaching staff’s useful and problematic observations over the last twelve months using only the SwDev cohort and correlates that to the previous reflections when three different cohorts formed an Agile team. Those reflections are described, and several recommendations are drawn from the experiences. The authors also discuss the lessons learnt and the effect of COVID-19 on the teams’ performance.