Combining Agile and DevOps to Improve

Students’ Tech and Non-tech Skills

Telcio Cardoso

, Rafael Chanin

, Alan R. Santos

and Afonso Sales

School of Technology, Pontiﬁcal Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, Zip Code 90619-900, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil

Keywords:

Software Engineering Education, Computer Science Education, Computer Science Curricula, DevOps,

Scrum, Challenge Based Learning.

Abstract:

The goal of this ongoing study is to understand how the development of soft skills is approached in the existing

computer science and software engineering curricula. Based on the ﬁndings and improvement opportunities,

we propose a high-level course structure to be used as a framework for those higher education organizations

who want to support the development of students technical and non-technical skills. With this proposal, we

believe computer science and software engineering students would be better prepared for the most recent IT

market requirements, fostering the development of the 21st century’s main competencies. In order to develop

the course structure presented in this study, we conducted a literature research, which showed the develop-

ment of students’ soft skills still requires improvement and more efﬁcient approaches. Our solution proposal

combines DevOps, Scrum and Challenge Based Learning approaches into one single course, which uses Agile

DevOps culture and values, along with continuous feedback, to promote students’ soft skills development.

1 INTRODUCTION

According to the Computer Engineering Curricula

2016

, industry leaders in general understand that

soft skills are essential for hiring in a computing-

related position (on Information Technology Curric-

ula, 2017). Additionally, a common sense in the in-

dustry indicates that soft skills and technical skills

have similar importance (on Information Technol-

ogy Curricula, 2017). The Computer Science Cur-

ricula 2013 (Joint Task Force on Computing Curric-

ula, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

and IEEE Computer Society, 2013) argues that stu-

dents will acquire some important soft skills and per-

sonal attributes through general college activities (e.g.

patience, time management, work ethic, and an ap-

preciation for diversity), and others through a spe-

ciﬁc curriculum. The ACM Cybersecurity Curricula

2017 (on Cybersecurity Education, 2018) emphasizes

the importance of developing technical skills and soft

skills in order to be ready to the transition from aca-

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6388-2448

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6293-7419

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8323-3472

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6962-3706

ACM Education Curricula Recommendations:

https://www.acm.org/education/curricula-recommendations

demic environments to a career within a corpora-

tion, organization, academic institution or even an

entrepreneurial environment.The ACM Information

Technology Curricula 2017 (on Information Technol-

ogy Curricula, 2017) argues that the ability to con-

nect to co-workers in a convincing manner will be ex-

tremely important in the future. Still according to the

ACM Information Technology Curricula 2017 (on In-

formation Technology Curricula, 2017), college and

universities are well positioned to teach IT techni-

cal skills, however, they encounter challenges when

teaching non-technical and soft skills.

Considering the importance of soft skills for com-

puter science and software engineering students’ ca-

reer and personal development, we conducted a liter-

ature research in order to understand how soft skills

are taught in higher education courses. Based on our

study results, we proposed a course to complement

the current Computer Science 2013 curricula guide-

lines, providing a more prescriptive structure to eval-

uate and develop soft skills, using DevOps and Agile

practices as foundation to improve such skills.

1.1 Problem Statement

Hazzan (Hazzan and Har-Shai, 2014) argue that a

simple web search reveals that most of the issues

Cardoso, T., Chanin, R., Santos, A. and Sales, A.

Combining Agile and DevOps to Improve Students’ Tech and Non-tech Skills.

DOI: 10.5220/0010401302990306

In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2021) - Volume 1, pages 299-306

ISBN: 978-989-758-502-9

299

associated with software development processes are

connected to people and that their origin is rooted in

cognitive, social and managerial aspects rather than

technical or technological aspects. In this sense, soft-

ware continuous delivery approaches, such as Scrum

and DevOps, are widely used in the software indus-

try, from startups to established companies. By being

not-siloed based, in order to be successful, teams that

use such approaches may require higher-levels of soft

skills from their team members.

Soft skills are a very important requirement in the

software development industry and such importance

is increased by new continuous delivery approaches

such as DevOps, but also on the collaboration among

different specialists and stakeholders (Kuusinen and

Albertsen, 2019).

Even understanding that soft skills are important,

and students will gain some of them over the com-

puter science course, there is not a clear guideline on

how to implement and develop such skills and neither

a clear course structure to evaluate and improve such

skills.

Soft skills are an important part of students’

development. However, they are generally neglected

in the computer science and software engineering

curricula in the majority of the higher education

institutions, which understand the importance of

such skills, however, lack of a more prescriptive

method to foster and measure the development of

such skills. Considering the importance of soft skills

to the students personal and professional live, the

main question this study aims to answer is:

Can we develop a new course to foster computer

science and software engineering. students’ soft

skills development, preparing them to the market, by

using industry emerging practices?

In order to further understand the usage of this

combination of Scrum and DevOps in the develop-

ment of students’ soft skills, we have performed a

literature research and presented a course structure

proposal to support the development of students’ soft

skills in higher education. The course teaches stu-

dents using an active learning framework: Challenge

Based Learning (Nichols et al., 2016). Our literature

research indicates that the development of soft skills

for higher education students of computer science and

software engineering courses is still an area to be im-

proved and lacks of more prescriptive course struc-

tures.

The remainder of this paper is organized as fol-

lows. Section 3 presents the research method applied

in this study, and in Section 4 we present relevant

ﬁndings from the selected studies. In Section 5, we

present the proposed course and its structure. Finally,

in Section 6 we conclude the paper with some ﬁnal

thoughts and future work.

2 BACKGROUND

2.1 Challenge Based Learning

Teaching students can be done in multiple ways.

Traditionally, learning is mostly based on lectures,

a teacher-centered approach which usually provides

low levels of interaction. On the other hand, ac-

tive learning is an approach that proposes high lev-

els of interaction and stimulates students to perform

not only low-order cognitive tasks, such as reading

and writing, but also high-order ones, including de-

bating, analysing and decision making (Fetaji and Fe-

taji, 2009; Ahmad and Gestwicki, 2013; Gestwicki

and Ahmad, 2011).

There are several active learning methodologies

that have been used in an educational setting. Problem

Based Learning, Project Based Learning, Task Based

Learning and Challenge Based Learning are just a

few examples of these frameworks. “The founda-

tions of experiential learning can be found within the

history of most cultures, but were formally organized

and presented by David Kolb drawing heavily on the

works of John Dewey and Jean Piaget” (Santos et al.,

2015a). Challenge Based Learning (CBL) (Nichols

et al., 2016) is a learning framework based on solving

real world challenges.

The CBL process begins with the deﬁnition of a

big idea, which is a broad concept that can be ex-

plored in several ways. The big idea has to be engag-

ing and important to students. Once the big idea is

chosen and the essential question is created, the chal-

lenge is deﬁned. From this point, students must come

up with the guiding questions and guiding activities

and resources, which will guide them to develop a

successful solution. The next step is analysis, which

will set the foundation for the deﬁnition of the solu-

tion. Once the solution is agreed upon, the implemen-

tation begins. Finally, evaluation is undertaken in or-

der to check out the whole process and verify if the

solution can be reﬁned.

2.2 DevOps

Commonly in medium and large companies, soft-

ware development and IT operations teams are struc-

tured in silos and the collaboration between these

CSEDU 2021 - 13th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

300

teams use to occur when operational resources are re-

quired from software development teams in order to

release new applications or functionalities, or, when

new released applications somehow compromise the

integrity of environments managed by IT operations

teams. Therefore, we have software development

teams aiming to deliver software to end-users as fast

as possible, however, such need for speed and faster

deliveries, sometimes, may compromise the integrity

of IT operations environments and, IT operations

teams, in the opposite side, aiming to ensure integrity

and stability of production environments, what may

conﬂict with software development teams goals.

In order to handle these conﬂicting goals between

software development and IT operations teams, sus-

taining the value delivery pace required by the mar-

ket, new practices were required. At the 2008 Agile

conference in Toronto, Canada, Patrick Debois and

Andrew Schafer presented a session to share their ex-

perience and research on applying Agile principles to

IT infrastructure, what would be later give origin to

the term DevOps, coined by Debois.

Husssani (Hussaini, 2014) deﬁnes DevOps as

an acronym for Development (Dev) and Operations

(Ops) of information technology systems and applica-

tions. Swartout et al. (Swartout, 2012) argues that De-

vOps is a way of working that encourages the collab-

oration between Development and Operations teams

towards the same goal.

An important aspect to take into consideration re-

garding DevOps is the fact that the movement is not

restricted to just a few IT operations teams. As Davis

et al. (Davis and Daniels, 2016) argue, there is no one

deﬁnitive list of teams or roles which should be in-

volved or how and, any team within the organization

should be considered in order to be more effective,

which includes security, support, QA, legal, among

other roles.

3 RESEARCH METHOD

In order to understand how students’ soft skills are

developed by Computer Science and Software Engi-

neering courses in higher-education organizations, we

performed a literature research.

The search terms were deﬁned based on the

main terms related to the subject of this research

and structured in terms of population and interven-

tion (Kitchenham, 2004). Based on these terms, the

ﬁnal search string used in this study is presented in

Table 1.

We have evaluated papers, articles, journals and

magazines, written in English language, with more

Table 1: Search String.

Type String

Population software engineering OR computer

science

Intervention AND soft skills AND devops

than 3 pages and published between 2010 and 2020.

The search string has been used to ﬁnd relevant infor-

mation at the ACM and IEEE online databases. Our

research resulted in 23 studies, from which 3 studies

have been considered relevant. Additionally, we have

complemented our initial research with a web search,

which resulted in 11 additional relevant studies which

have their contribution added to our study.

4 FINDINGS

The following paragraphs provide details of the most

relevant contribution from the studies we selected.

Hazzan et al. (Hazzan and Har-Shai, 2014) con-

ducted a study at the Israeli Computer Science de-

partment, the largest CS department in Israel. The

study describes the experience related to a 14 weeks

course and was designed for both CS and SE students,

ﬁrst, to expose them to a variety of soft skills, and

second, to enable them to acquire these skills gradu-

ally by experiencing them and reﬂecting upon them.

The course structure was based on the CM/IEEE-CS

Computer Science Curricula 2013 recommendations.

The authors argue that over the course, the following

skills were mentioned by at least 25% of students as

being important for teamwork: listening skills, dif-

ferent aspects of teamwork, interpersonal communi-

cation, giving feedback, ﬂexibility, time and pressure

management, knowledge transfer, and patience. The

study also provided some interesting insights regard-

ing the soft skills mentioned by the students as the

ones they would like to improve, such as Time Man-

agement, Presentation Skills, Creativity, among oth-

ers. The authors still argue that students repeatedly

expressed the idea that soft skills should be learned

by expressing and experiencing them.

Sedelmaier (Sedelmaier and Landes, 2014) con-

ducted a study to evaluate which soft skills are im-

portant for software engineers and proposed a body

of skills (SWEBOS). The authors argue that SWE-

BOS treats skills in a merely descriptive fashion. The

authors still argue that there is no guideline as how

to break down required competencies, be it tech-

nical or non-technical, into teaching goals that can

be addressed in university education for future soft-

ware engineers. The study concluded the top three

soft skills in software engineering are comprehension

Combining Agile and DevOps to Improve Students’ Tech and Non-tech Skills

301

of the complexity of software engineering processes,

awareness of problems and understanding of cause-

effect relationships, and team competence including

communication skills.

Ahmed (Ahmed et al., 2012) surveyed jobs ad-

vertised on the following online portals: workopo-

lis.ca (North America), eurojobs.com (Europe), mon-

sterindia.com (Asia), and seek.com.au (Australia).

The results presented the main soft skills required by

the software market in North America, Europe, Asia

and Australia in 2012. The main soft skills were inter-

personal skills, analytical and problem-solving, team

playing, organizational skills, fast learning, ability to

work independently, innovative, open and adaptable

to change.

In the study conducted by Carter (Carter, 2011),

employment ads for software engineer of 50 com-

panies were evaluated in order to identify the main

soft skills required by employers. The study also ap-

plied a survey at Point Loma Nazarene Mathemati-

cal, Information and Computer Science university de-

partments to understand the importance of soft skills

from student’s perspective. The study argues that

communication appears to be the number one de-

sired skill across the board, but employers explicitly

ask for employment-ready computer science and en-

gineering students to have other skills as well. The

authors also mention that dedicated soft skill courses

have proven to be extremely unpopular with both stu-

dents and professors alike. The students feel that

they are being presented with information that they

already know. The study also provided details about

a capstone course the university provides, which uses

Project-Based Learning to practice and develop the

soft skills required by the employers.

Matturro (Matturro et al., 2015) conducted a set

of surveys with software development team members

and team leaders from the Uruguay software industry

and concluded that leadership, communication skills,

customer orientation, interpersonal skills, and team-

work are the most valued for team leaders, while an-

alytic, problem-solving, commitment, responsibility,

eagerness to learn, motivation, and teamwork are the

most valued ones for team members.

Kerzazi (Kerzazi and Adams, 2016), performed

an empirical analysis of online job postings to deter-

mine and compare the main tasks of release and De-

vOps engineers, globally and across countries. Ac-

cording to authors, automation is the most important

activity across the three roles, as articulated in job

posting description data, and that the release engineer

role combines the top activities of the DevOps and

more traditional build engineer roles. The role of re-

lease engineer seems to combine the most important

activities of DevOps and more traditional build engi-

neers, either because of incorrect choice of role name

or roles taking up more responsibilities than would

be expected from them. Still according to the au-

thors, although not an explicit variable in our anal-

ysis, build/DevOps/release engineers are needed by

any kind of company, regardless of whether it is a

startup or an established one (based on the job ad de-

scription). For start-ups, the responsibilities are more

guided towards supporting development, followed by

build, continuous integration, and fast delivery (build-

ing an effective pipeline of releases).

Valentin (Valentin et al., 2015) proposed a

methodology to improve students’ soft skills by us-

ing Scrum in a systematic project development ex-

perience. The methodology was applied to research

groups from different areas. According to the au-

thors, the Scrum framework offers several opportuni-

ties for students exercise different skills by means of

well-structured events, roles, and artifacts. Writing,

oral presentation, leadership, transparency, organiza-

tion, and pace were the improvements most reported

by the involved people.

Bastarrica (Bastarrica et al., 2017) developed a

capstone course to support the development of crit-

ical soft skills to succeed in software development

project, introducing some agile practices into an ex-

isting course, however, lacked details regarding which

soft skills were evaluated and how to evaluate the im-

provements.

Andersson (Andersson and Logofatu, 2018) pro-

posed an approach to improve the Master students’

soft skills through a Mathematics Update course. An

interesting insight provided by this study is related to

the usage of discussion groups to align concepts about

soft skills among the students. Another interesting ap-

proach mentioned by the authors is the self-evaluation

survey, which allows the student to self-evaluate in or-

der to have a baseline and better understand how they

are improving over the course.

Thurner (Thurner et al., 2016) identiﬁed four rea-

sons why students struggle with their soft skills and

competencies during the ﬁrst semesters and designed

a learning project that addresses technical as well as

non-technical competencies in an integrated way. One

of the insights provided by this study is related to the

practice of self-reﬂection as a way to improve self-

awareness on students regarding their soft skills.

In the study conducted by Brabov (Bobrov et al.,

2020), experiences regarding teaching DevOps in the

Industry and in the Academia were shared by the

authors. The authors argue that DevOps experi-

enced signiﬁcant success in the industrial sector, but

still requires attention in higher education. The au-

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302

thors presented the knowledge structure used over

the course which was mainly focused on the Deploy-

ment Pipeline. The course used a PBL (Problem-

Based Learning) approach and the students worked in

groups to solve challenges they received. One of the

lessons learned in the study is related to the impor-

tance of soft skills in DevOps. The authors argue that

soft skills capabilities are a must for future software

engineers working expected to work in a DevOps-

oriented organization. The authors still argue that by

working in groups students get involved in a context

where problems may arise, allowing them to learn soft

skills to deal with such as problems.

Similar to PBL, there are different active learning

methodologies including Challenge-Based Learning

(CBL). Santos (Santos et al., 2015b) present a new

learning and software development framework that

combines Agile methodologies with CBL. CBL

a learning framework developed by educators work-

ing with Apple Inc., which has been implemented

in a wide variety of educational and corporate set-

tings (Santos et al., 2015b).

Kuusinen (Kuusinen and Albertsen, 2019) inves-

tigated how to organize the structure of multidisci-

plinary and complex architecture courses by design-

ing and executing a Continuous Delivery (CD) and a

DevOps oriented course. The authors argue that the

main motivation to perform the study was related to

inability of the educational system to adapt to the mar-

ket needs and match the available skills with all exist-

ing jobs. The authors proposed a study topics struc-

ture mainly focused on the technical aspects related

to CD and DevOps. After designing the structure, the

course ran over two weeks, with 15 students partici-

pating on it. The authors argue the students were par-

ticularly happy about learning both practical and aca-

demic skills. The biggest complaint was the workload

of 125 study hours over two calendar weeks. More-

over, content-wise the students wished that the prac-

tical and theoretical days would be mixed. Regarding

infrastructure and tools, overhead of keeping up with

the industrial state-of-the-art at universities is often

too high. Still regarding the toolset used, the authors

argue that in the continuous deployment era, universi-

ties need to explore feasible ways to keep up with the

technological development in a way that allows them

to concentrate on fundamentals and underpinning the-

ories that help the students in lifelong learning, but at

the same time also keep the employability of a newly

graduated in mind.

Buffardi (Buffardi et al., 2017) argue that educa-

tional programming assignments have limited scope

Details and samples about CBL are also available at

http://www.challengebasedlearning.org

and rigid design and introduce a Tech Startup ap-

proach to teaching Agile software development in a

software engineering course leveraging collaboration

and entrepreneurship aspects. According to the au-

thors, such experience should help students to de-

velop soft skills, specially communication, once stu-

dents will be contact with non-technical stakeholders

as well as class colleagues.

Melegati (Melegati et al., 2019) study investigated

how software engineering students learned startup

development methodologies and the challenges and

beneﬁts of such learning process. According to the

authors, such learning process allows the develop-

ment of several soft skills and the importance of busi-

ness concepts.

5 COURSE PROPOSAL

Based on the problem stated in Subsection 1.1 and the

lessons learned from the previous studies evaluated

in Section 4, we propose a course structure, which

uses DevOps, Scrum and Challenge Based Learning

(CBL) approaches to help with the development of

soft skills and technical skills, which are in demand

in the information technology market as presented in

Figure 1.

Figure 1: Course Structure Proposal.

The usage of DevOps as an integrative approach

is especially important in the computer science and

software engineering context, once it allows the joint

of several areas, such as Cloud Computing, Net-

works, Operational Systems, Database Management

and Software Development, among others. The us-

age of Scrum is proposed because, along with De-

vOps, it fosters the communication and collaboration

among team members, over extensive documentation

and processes. The usage of Challenge Based Learn-

ing is recommended based on the characteristics of

this framework, which provides a powerful learning

and problem-solving approach on real problems. The

purpose of the course structure described in the fol-

Combining Agile and DevOps to Improve Students’ Tech and Non-tech Skills

303

lowing section is to provide a high-level guideline to

be used by institutions who are willing to improve stu-

dents’ soft skills and technical skills.

5.1 Course Structure

The aim of our proposal is to provide a high-level

framework using the lessons learned from the stud-

ies previously evaluated and the industry emerging

practices. Before we provide details about the pro-

posed course structure, it is important to emphasize

that some characteristics of the structure proposed,

such as duration, could be adapted according to each

institution needs and the number of students attending

to the course. Table 2 provides a macro description of

the course structure.

Table 2: Course Structure.

Phase Description Duration

Sprint 1 CBL: Macro Challenge - En-

gage/Investigate

8 hours

Sprint 1 CBL: Student Reﬂection 30 minutes

Sprint 1 Peer Feedback Session (Pro-

fessor)

30 minutes

Sprint 1 Peer Feedback Session (Col-

league)

30 minutes

Sprint 2 CBL: Macro Challenge - Act

- DevOps Fundamentals

8 hours

Sprint 2 CBL: Student Reﬂection 30 minutes

Sprint 2 Peer Feedback Session (Pro-

fessor)

30 minutes

Sprint 2 Peer Feedback Session (Col-

league)

30 minutes

Sprint 3 CBL: Macro Challenge - Act

- Building Deploy Environ-

ments

8 hours

Sprint 3 CBL: Student Reﬂection 30 minutes

Sprint 3 Peer Feedback Session (Pro-

fessor)

30 minutes

Sprint 3 Peer Feedback Session (Col-

league)

30 minutes

Sprint 4 CBL: Macro Challenge – Act

- Building the CI/CD Pipeline

8 hours

Sprint 4 CBL: Student Reﬂection 30 minutes

Sprint 4 Peer Feedback Session (Pro-

fessor)

30 minutes

Sprint 4 Peer Feedback Session (Col-

league)

30 minutes

Sprint 5 CBL: Macro Challenge - Act

- Adding Test Automation to

the Pipeline

8 hours

Sprint 5 CBL: Student Reﬂection 30 minutes

Sprint 5 Peer Feedback Session (Pro-

fessor)

30 minutes

Sprint 5 Peer Feedback Session (Col-

league)

30 minutes

At the beginning of the course, students should be

grouped in teams and each team should deﬁne a real-

world problem to be solved with a software based so-

lution. In order to ensure that different areas of com-

puter science or software engineering will be explored

over the course, some requisites should be deﬁned by

the professors at the beginning of the course. In ev-

ery sprint, the students will be given an introductory

class about a speciﬁc DevOps subject and, following

the CBL framework, will work together to plan and

deliver what has been planned. Elements of the De-

vOps subject discussed at the beginning of each sprint

are expected to be implemented by each team, as part

of the software solution to be delivered at the end of

the sprint.

At the end of each sprint, the students should per-

form a CBL reﬂection, individually, in order to reﬂect

about their own learnings and improvement oppor-

tunities, regarding the soft skills they have practiced

over the sprint.

Hattie (Hattie and Timperley, 2007) argue that

feedback can be a great approach to support students’

learning and achievements. In order to provide feed-

back to each one of the students regarding their soft

skills and improvement opportunities, professors are

encouraged to schedule a 30 minutes meeting after the

end of each sprint with each student. For several rea-

sons, face-to-face feedbacks are recommended. Such

approach could be challenging to the professors based

on the number of students. However, we encourage

the engagement of more than one professor in the

course, in order to ensure the feedbacks will be pro-

vided with enough details to allow improvements on

each individual’s soft skills. As this course is a joint

of several areas, the participation of other professors

in the soft skills evaluation process is highly recom-

mended.

Sadler (Sadler, 2010) argues that peer assessment

is also the most natural way to provide tacit and ex-

plicit knowledge transfer. Based on Sadler’s ﬁndings,

we also consider having a peer assessment approach,

where, at the end of each sprint, each student should

be assessed by their peers, which includes professors

and other students, on the soft skills agreed to be eval-

uated over the course.

Regarding the soft skills to be developed, Table 3

provides a list of important soft skills we identiﬁed in

the previous studies evaluated as well as their charac-

teristics.

Additionally, Table 4 describes the main rituals

which could be used to evaluate the students and each

one of the skills to be developed.

It is important to emphasize that the skills se-

lected to be evaluated in our course proposal could

CSEDU 2021 - 13th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

304

Table 3: Soft skills evaluation.

Soft Skill Description

Team work Cooperative, gets along with oth-

ers, agreeable, supportive, help-

ful, collaborative

Communication Oral speaking capability, written,

presenting, listening, clear and

structured speech

Problem Solv-

ing

Ability to frame a problem and de-

ﬁne a structured course of action

Decision Mak-

ing

Ability to take decisions in a

timely matter, rationally, using the

available information

Table 4: Rituals.

Soft Skill Ritual

Team work Sprint Planning, Backlog Groom-

ing, Tasks Execution, CBL En-

gage/Investigate/Act

Communication

(verbal)

Daily Scrum, Sprint Retrospec-

tive, Sprint Planning, Backlog

Grooming, CBL Reﬂection

Communication

(written)

User Stories, Behavior Driven De-

velopment Speciﬁcations, Knowl-

edge Transfer, CBL Reﬂection

Problem Solv-

ing

Tasks Execution, Re-

searching Solutions, CBL

Engage/Investigate/Act

Decision Mak-

ing

Sprint Planning, Backlog

Grooming, Tasks Execution,

Researching Solutions, CBL

Engage/Investigate/Act

be adapted according to the institutions and industry

needs.

5.2 Course Evaluation

In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the course

structure proposed, questionnaires should be applied

at the beginning and after the conclusion of the

course. The comparison between both question-

naires’ responses, along with feedbacks provided by

peers and professors over the course, will provide

means to evaluate the progress and development of

the students at the end of the course, as well, should

provide valuable insights to promote improvements to

the course structure.

6 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE

WORKS

This study proposed a framework that takes advan-

tage of cultural aspects from emerging software de-

velopment and active learning practices such as De-

vOps, Scrum and CBL to support the development

of Software Engineering and Computer Science stu-

dents in higher education courses. The development

of this framework was motivated by the need of a

more prescriptive guideline to develop such skills and

due to the market needs (Ahmed et al., 2012; Carter,

2011). The usage of Challenge Based Learning ele-

ments as part of this framework was also motivated

by some of the studies we analyzed (Thurner et al.,

2016; Santos et al., 2015b) . This study is still a work

in progress, therefore, a more extensive research on

the literature could bring additional insights to com-

plement our proposal. As a future work, we aim to ap-

ply the solution proposed on an experimental course

in order to validate the outcomes and propose changes

based on the lessons learned.

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