Paper Info
Title
An Agile Conversion Masters Degree Programme in Software Development.
Abstract
The Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry in New Zealand is growing rapidly. The traditional university courses are preparing an insufficient number of graduates to sustain the growth. Many of the traditional graduate students lack key soft skills that are important in team based software development. This paper reports on the development of a conversion Master of Software Development degree. The students are all graduates with little or no computer science degrees, are taught key programming skills, with a focus on agile development. The programme begins by focusing on individual programming skills through solving problems. Later industrial partners are engaged by providing industrial problems to agile teams of students. The industrial partners are active partners in the agile teams as product owners. By solving the problems, the students develop both technical and non-technical skills while utilizing the skills obtained from previous studies. The results from the first year of the programme are encouraging. A key result is that a high number of students found work in paid IT positions before graduating. The main issue of the first year was introducing too many topics at the same time, over-assessment, not enough communication and contact time, little opportunity for the students to make their own experiences, and learning by making mistakes. The programme has been changed for the next year/s cohort to introduce less topics at once, provide time and space for learning, and a redesign of scheduling assessments.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1145/3159450.3159540
SIGCSE '18: The 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education Baltimore Maryland USA February, 2018
Keywords
Field
DocType
Agile Software Development,Graduate Studies,Individual and Group Work,Internships,Masters Degree,Programming,Soft Skills
Soft skills,Internship,Engineering management,Scheduling (computing),Computer science,Contact time,Knowledge management,Agile software development,Information and Communications Technology,Software development
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-5103-4
0
0.34
References 
Authors
1
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Karsten Øster Lundqvist1184.17
Craig Anslow214025.77
Michael Homer34610.38
Kris Bubendorfer434129.28
Dale A. Carnegie511632.50