A Lightweight Scrum Sprint Simulation to Help Learners Traverse the Empirical Process Control Threshold Concept
For educators teaching Scrum, this provides a practical, scalable simulation, but the evidence is qualitative and incremental.
The paper presents a lightweight Scrum sprint simulation to help learners understand empirical process control, and reports its effectiveness in two master-level courses and TA training based on student feedback mapped to threshold concepts.
Empirical process control, a way of managing work based on the observation of the successes or misfortunes of earlier activities, is a key process in Scrum and other agile development frameworks. In this experience report, we present a lightweight, scalable, free and customizable sprint simulation activity designed to teach students how to empirically control a Scrum project by engaging in the presentation and interpretation of work status information, task selection and resource allocations in a single teaching session. We reflect on our experience using the simulation as an active learning complement to direct instruction in two master level courses at two different universities and in the training of teaching assistants at a third institution, and abductively establish its effectiveness by mapping student comments to the teaching practices in the threshold concepts framework.