An adaptive 3D virtual learning environment for training software developers in scrum

ABSTRACT

Scrum is one of the most used frameworks for agile software development because of its potential improvements in productivity, quality, and client satisfaction. Academia has also focussed on teaching Scrum practices to prepare students to face common software engineering challenges and facilitate their insertion in professional contexts. Furthermore, advances in learning technologies currently offer many virtual learning environments to enhance learning in many ways. Their capability to consider the individual learner preferences has led a shift to more personalised training approaches, requiring that the environments adapt themselves to the learner. We propose an adaptive approach for training developers in Scrum, including an adaptive virtual learning environment based on Felder's learning style theory. Although still preliminary, our findings show that students who used the environment and received instruction matching their preferences obtained sightly higher learning gains than students who received a different instruction than the one they preferred. We also noticed less variability in the learning gains of students who received instruction matching their preferences. The relevance of this work goes beyond the impact on learning gains since it describes how adaptive virtual learning environments can be used in the domain of Software Engineering.

KEYWORDS:

• Adaptive learning environments
• scrum
• agile software development
• learning styles

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://github.com/vircadia/vircadia

2 https://github.com/Aca1990/VoRtex-School

3 https://github.com/tivolicloud/

4 https://www.sansar.com/

5 https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/onlinelearning-courses/teaching-with-fortnite-creative

6 https://secondlife.com/

7 JIRA Website – https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira

8 Translated version available as supplementary material.

9 JIRA web site – https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Argentina. Ezequiel Scott is currently founded by the Estonian Center of Excellence in ICT research (EXCITE) of the Estonian Research Council.

Notes on contributors

Ezequiel Scott

Ezequiel Scott received his Ph.D. in Computer Science degree from Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires (UNICEN), Argentina, in 2016. He is currently a Lecturer of Software Engineering at the Institute of Computer Science, University of Tartu, Estonia. His research interests are in the areas of agile software development, software engineering education, and applied machine learning to aid teams to develop software in a better way.

Marcelo Campo

Marcelo Campo received the Computer Engineer degree from Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires (UNICEN), Tandil, Argentina, in 1988 and the Ph.D degree in Computer Science from Instituto de Informática de la Universidad Federal de Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil, in 1997. He is currently a Professor at the Faculty of Exact Sciences, UNICEN, and principal researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET). He has been the director of the ISISTAN Research Institute (CONICET – UNICEN) and currently the director of NICE research group. His research interests include intelligent aided software engineering, software architecture and frameworks, agent technology, and software visualisation.