An agile project management experience: points of view of graduate students.

One of the main challenges of teaching software engineering (SE) is providing students with meaningful experiences and skills that can be used in real-world projects. In order to overcome this challenge, the adoption of activities that go beyond theoretical classes has shown good results. For example, carry out collaborative hands-on projects that require students to extensively apply software engineering concepts may lead to better skills development. In this paper we present our experience over the first semester of 2017 in the SE course as part of our academic Masters of Science degree program at the Universidade de SAco Paulo (USP). A group of 5 graduate students managed teams of 8 to 11 undergraduate students during a semester divided in four phases of project development. The projects were developed using the agile methods SCRUM and Feature Driven Development. Both graduate and undergraduate students with different levels of knowledge were evaluated in all phases. We explain the dynamics of the teams, and discuss both undergraduate and graduate students experiences. The graduate students reported that the experience was successful and very important to improve their management skills.