Improving Teamwork in Agile Software Engineering Education: The ASEST+ Framework

Abstract

<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Contribution:</i> This article presents agile software engineers stick together (ASEST+), an improved version of a framework called ASEST that aims to develop team cohesion, leading to better team learning and software engineering student teams. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</i> Effective teamwork is crucial for agile software development’s success and is, therefore, a key topic of current software engineering education. In the previous work, a preliminary proposal for ASEST+ was presented. Here, an improved version, more suitable for agile practice education and considering cohesion antecedents, is described. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Intended Outcome:</i> A teaching-learning framework to support teamwork in agile software education. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Application Design:</i> ASEST+ is built around Scrum teams and combines learning strategies to train students in collaborative and technical agile practices. ASEST+ establishes policies for role allocation and team rule agreements to regulate communication and address conflict management agile practices. ASEST+ addresses personality traits, conflict resolution, and task interdependence as the antecedents identified as the most important. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Findings:</i> A quasiexperiment showed that the use of ASEST+ significantly increases the students’ positive perceptions on team cohesion, team performance, and team learning compared with the control group.