Orchestrating Agile Sprint Reviews In Undergraduate Capstone Projects

This Innovate Practice Full Paper presents an orchestrated way to conducting agile sprint reviews in undergraduate capstone projects. An undergraduate capstone project typically involves a student development team as well as other stakeholders such as faculty advisors and industry mentors. Given that the agile development approach is adopted, a sprint review is conducted at the end of each sprint to demonstrate and critique the features that the development team have completed. Unlike the industrial settings, capstone design students can be challenged when conducting agile sprint reviews. On the one hand, the availability of industry mentors is unpredictable due to their own business commitments and schedules. On the other hand, it is extremely hard to bring all stakeholders together in one meeting. To overcome these difficulties, in our practice we have employed two strategies. First, we used a so-called agile buddy approach which allows each team to acquire an outsider student's opinion on their system. Second, we adopted a web-based collaboration platform such that students can collect critiques asynchronously from different stakeholders.