Coping with Uncertainty in an Agile Systems Development Course
Abstract
Uncertain and ambiguous environments are commonplace in information systems development (ISD) projects, and while different Agile frameworks welcome changes in organizational, technical, and business environments, the incurred uncertainty is known to negatively affect the development process and the quality of the final product. The effects of uncertainty on ISD projects have been studied in the past in real organizational contexts, but the effects of uncertainty on students in Agile systems development have received less attention from scholars. In this study, we measured the effects of experienced uncertainty on students’ performance in an Agile systems development course and how uncertainty affected the quality of the system developed by the students using Scrum. We implemented the course using a problem based learning (PBL) approach and simulated uncertainty through various work environment reflecting concepts. Our study reveals that the effects of uncertainty are fairly similar among students and software professionals, and we identified three different coping strategies that students used with varying degrees of success. We present that learning approaches such as PBL enable a befitting environment for students to acquire hands-on experience in coping with uncertain environments, thus mitigating the problems students are likely to face in their work environments.
Main Authors
Format
Articles
Research article
Published
2018
Series
Subjects
Publication in research information system
Publisher
Information Systems and Computing Academic Professionals
Original source
http://jise.org/Volume29/n2/JISEv29n2p117.pdf
The permanent address of the publication
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:jyu-201808203866Use this for linking
Review status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1055-3096
Language
English
Published in
Journal of Information Systems Education
Citation
- Taipalus, T., Seppänen, V., & Pirhonen, M. (2018). Coping with Uncertainty in an Agile Systems Development Course. Journal of Information Systems Education, 29(2), 117-126. http://jise.org/Volume29/n2/JISEv29n2p117.pdf
Copyright© 2018 the Information Systems & Computing Academic Professionals, Inc.