How Teams Learn Agility, a Beginner’s Guide for Software Development

Due to the SARS-COVID19 Pandemic, the need for information technology professionals has increased. At a global level, it is necessary to have teams in projects with agile methodologies. These methodologies allow permanent deliveries, risk management, and change management. Rapid application development, scrum and extreme programming stand out to develop software. It is proposed a model to identify main problems and guide beginner teams based on a set of good practices in developing and managing an agile project. Thus, it contributes to the quality of the software product and the satisfaction of the client. The methodology considers four stages. Firstly, the development team makes progress on the functionalities. Then, they are assessed to identify problems and difficulties to work with agile methodologies. Finally, the senior scrum master socialises good practices from the literature to be applied in the next iteration of the project. The research project lasted two years. The university involved 14 final year undergraduate students’ teams from systems engineering that developed an information and communications technology project. In a first cohort, 32 problems are detected in the implementation of scrum/XP, which impact the project’s objectives and the minimum viable product committed in each Sprint. The second cohort students applied good practices to minimise the problems when developing the software with scrum/XP, reducing more than 85% of the first cohort’s problems.