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Lean Learning of Risks in Students’ Agile Teams

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Agile and Lean Concepts for Teaching and Learning

Abstract

Risk—the possibility of resulting in an unsatisfactory outcome—is an important driving force for a software development project to progress. Although techniques like identifying a project’s top-10 risk items are taught commonly in software engineering courses, little work has been carried out to examine how students working in agile teams perceive and mitigate the risks over multiple software development cycles. In this chapter, we summarize our recent work where we discovered the collaborative nature of students’ risk management strategies. Furthermore, we show that students also followed lean practices by wasting little effort on non-actionable risks. Linking collaboration and waste-elimination provided additional insights into teaching a wider range of lean principles in agile settings, e.g., students should deliver as fast as possible the non-collaborative risk mitigations but should decide as late as possible when facing interdependent mitigations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of EECS, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, 45221, USA

    Wentao Wang, Chaitra Thota, **aoyu **, Nan Niu & Carla C. Purdy

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  1. Wentao Wang
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  2. Chaitra Thota
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  3. **aoyu **
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  4. Nan Niu
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  5. Carla C. Purdy
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nan Niu .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. The Mind Lab by Unitec, Auckland, New Zealand

    David Parsons

  2. Eastern Institute of Technology, Napier, New Zealand

    Kathryn MacCallum

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Wang, W., Thota, C., **, X., Niu, N., Purdy, C.C. (2019). Lean Learning of Risks in Students’ Agile Teams. In: Parsons, D., MacCallum, K. (eds) Agile and Lean Concepts for Teaching and Learning. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2751-3_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2751-3_13

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  • Online ISBN: 978-981-13-2751-3

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