Challenges (and Opportunities!) of a Remote Agile Software Engineering Project Course During COVID-19

Abstract

COVID-19 and its immediate impacts on teaching activities have required changes from computer science educators worldwide. We switched our on-site courses to remote setups without detailed knowledge of what tools, techniques, and methods would work in different teaching contexts. A growing amount of experience reports on general best practices for remote teaching in higher education are available. However, university courses featuring practical software development projects present unique challenges regarding remote learning, as effective student collaboration is vital. In these courses, students tackle situations in the project and their team meetings that would also occur in real software projects experienced in industry settings. In this paper, we share our experiences on how we successfully adapted our software engineering project course to a remote setup, which challenges we observed in student teams and how they can be mitigated, and what (surprisingly) worked better than expected. Finally, we propose improvements that we expect will be beneficial not only for future remote-only but also for hybrid or on-site courses.