“Extreme Development” as a Means for Learning Agile

During the 2020 pandemic a new modality for the capstone project in Software Engineering was introduced to our third-year students in Computer Science. They have been tasked with the development of a non trivial software product - a Twitter client capable of visual analytics - using some Agile practices, exploiting a Scrum-like process model, and using only open source tools. Due to circumstances that were either planned (in the selection of tools and requirements) or unintended (the pandemic forbade any physical meeting), the project had some interesting outcomes. The project was not easy to enact, neither for the students nor for the instructors. The main problems were two: the students were not ready to practice agile teamwork, and the open source tools they had to use were demanding and only partly suitable for the goal they were chosen for. We term this experience - where students applied an agile discipline and were required to use only open source tools - an “extreme” agile development project. This paper - written by two students together with their instructor, summarises some lessons learnt: characteristics and features of the tools and practices used, the evolution of product artifacts and some difficulties encountered, along with the solutions we adopted. An important lesson learnt is that an agile project developed by Computer Science students requires specific training in communicating correct information at the right moment, and avoiding telling “social lies” concerning the status of both the product and its development process.