Using Agile Management to Share Course Projects Among Multiple Classes

Abstract

Project based courses have become popular as a way of engaging students and providing practical experiences. Sharing a single project between two course provides advantages of permitting more focus on the subject of each class, larger projects (more help and expertise is available) and greater opportunities for coordinated team work, and to appreciate how disciplines interact. A disadvantage is scheduling and managing class activities and risk to assure that useful project work is done at a pace benefiting both classes. This paper describes an experience in which an Agile approach was used to successfully coordinate project activities among a Software Development course and a User Interaction Design course.A major portion of most projects involves a user interface. While much effort is spent in coding the user interface, only cursory treatment is given to user interface design. Similarly, the user interaction design course, also a senior/graduate level course, has only