Abstract

In the early 2000s, the Agile methodology emerged as a groundbreaking approach for developing software, which now is skyrocketing in popularity for all types of business projects (Rigby et al. 2016; Šalgovičová and Klinčeková 2020). Agile is a group of principles, not a prescribed set of processes for project management (Agile Alliance 2001). However, there are some common practices Agile teams adopt to support the principles (Singh and Strobel 2022). Stand-up meetings are one of the practices teams adopt to support the Agile principle of valuing collaboration (Sandsto and Reme-Ness 2021). During stand-up meetings the team members literally stand in a circle to keep the meeting short (Stray et al. 2017). Team members answer three questions during the meeting: (a) What task did you just finish? (b) What is your next task? (c) What are your roadblocks to making progress? This practice can easily be transported to the classroom (physical or online) to encourage students to share their progress with their professor and classmates (Sharp and Lang 2018). The practice of stand-up meetings allows the professor to identify common areas where students need guidance and encourages students to pair together to troubleshoot issues (D’Souza and Rodrigues 2015). The collaboration fostered by stand-up meetings helps to nurture respect and trust in the classroom (Hulshult and Krehbiel 2019). This exploratory case study examines students’ experience of engaging in stand-up meetings as a part of a course in their Management Information Systems (MIS) program. Multiple course sections were involved in the study. Example curriculum, such as assignment instructions, are included to serve as curricular supports for faculty seeking to employ stand-up meetings in their own courses. This exploratory study is a prelude to implementing a larger-scale investigation of student perceptions of stand-up meetings. The research was conducted using a mixed methods approach that employed a survey instrument with both open-ended and closed-ended questions to gather students’ perceptions. An intersectional analysis was performed on the quantitative data, while the qualitative data was analyzed using a thematic coding approach. The results of this study will be applied to refine the course curriculum and survey instrument prior to a longitudinal study examining the use of stand-up meetings across multiple semesters. Due to the rising popularity of Agile, this significant study takes place at a critical time to share with other faculty the experience of implementing student stand-up meetings. The broad impact of this study is to serve as a proof-of-concept and starting point for other faculty interested in developing Agile course curriculum which includes the practice of stand-up meetings. References Agile Alliance. 2001. “Agile Manifesto and Principles.” (http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html). D’Souza, M. J., and Rodrigues, P. 2015. “Extreme pedagogy: An agile teaching-learning methodology for engineering education,” Indian Journal of Science and Technology (8:9), pp. 828–833. Hulshult, A. R., and Krehbiel, T. C. 2019. “Using Eight Agile Practices in an Online Course to Improve Student Learning and Team Project Quality,” Journal of Higher Education Theory and Practice (19:3), pp. 55–68. Rigby, D. K., Sutherland, J., and Takeuchi, H. 2016. “Embracing Agile,” Harvard Business Review (2016:May). Šalgovičová, J., and Klinčeková, S. 2020. “Introduction to Agile Way of Working,” Megatrends and Media (7:1), pp. 441–446. Sandsto, R., and Reme-Ness, C. 2021. “Agile Practices and Impacts on Project Success,” Journal of Engineering, Project, and Production Management (11:3), pp. 255–262. Sharp, J. H., and Lang, G. 2018. “Agile in Teaching and Learning: Conceptual Framework and Research Agenda,” Journal of Information Systems Education (29:2), pp. 45–51. Singh, K., and Strobel, J. 2022. “Exploring lived experiences of agile developers with daily stand-up meetings: a phenomenological study,” Behaviour & Information Technology, pp. 1–21. Stray, V., Moe, N. B., and Bergersen, G. R. 2017. “Are Daily Stand-up Meetings Valuable? A Survey of Developers in Software Teams,” in Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming, H. Baumeister, H. Lichter, and M. Riebisch (eds.), Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 274–281.

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