Manaus, the capital city of the state of Amazonas and the sixth Brazilian largest gross domestic product, demands highly qualified hardware and software developers for consumer electronics and telecommunication sectors of its free trading zone. However, what can be viewed as an opportunity for the youth alumni of local institutions of higher education contrasts with the low level of qualification provided by such institutions. As a consequence, most positions either remain opened or are occupied by professionals from other Brazilian regions. Moreover, the issue relies more on soft skills than on hard skills, as the local institutions are aligned with International standard academic curriculum and cover modern technologies. Soft skill is the enter barrier to the job market. English proficiency, communication skill, writing (in both Portuguese and English) skill, among others, are top listed failure reasons in the hiring processes. As one project manager highlighted: “it is much cheaper and quicker for the company to fill in some specific technological gaps, than to leverage a poor English proficiency”. This paper presents a proposal of an involving activity aiming to address several soft skills at the same time, with minimal disturbance in the student daily routine. The concept is based on the impact of immersing the student in a systematic project development experience. Clear communicated project goal, where the students have specific roles, with assigned accountable peers, everything under the umbrella of an Agile-like software development process (derived from SCRUM) are in the core of the activity. This paper details the incremental implementation methodology of the program among four research areas, and 23 projects or project activities, involving 34 students. The results of the two years running program will also be described, including the increase of progress visibility by advisors, the improvement of students communication and writing skills and the qualification on SCRUM software development process tools and documentation. The authors mapped important success factors in achieving relevant improvement on students' profile, and presented a list of recommendations for the next phase of the program, including some obvious one, as the importance of the active participation of advisors, and some less obvious one, like the resistance to the Internet online tool due to daily meeting coinciding with the peak of Internet usage in the University.

Rapid improvement of students' soft-skills based on an agile-process approach

The aim of this paper was to present a review, an analysis, and a classification and coding of the literature on the Scrum method. Publications of interest were found through a search on CAPES periodicals database. Those publications were classified according to their origin, year of publication, type of study, approach, authors' membership, and reporting period. An investigation was conducted in order to find the benefits of using the Scrum method. Results showed that the literature on the subject is still scarce, but it is expanding and presents a lack of longitudinal and quantitative studies. It was concluded that there is a great demand for the generation of scientific knowledge on the subject.

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Scrum agile product development method - literature review, analysis and classification

Este trabalho propoe uma aplicacao multiplataforma para dispositivos moveis voltada ao gerenciamento de projetos. O Chronos Mobi baseia-se no modelo Chronos, cujos componentes englobam mapas mentais, PMBoK e Scrum. A implementacao baseou-se no uso do framework Phonegap que prove inumeros recursos para o desenvolvimento movel. Para a avaliacao do Chronos Mobi realizou-se uma analise comparativa do desempenho da aplicacao executando em tablets e smartphones nas plataformas Android, Windows Phone e Symbian.

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Chronos Mobi: uma aplicação móvel multiplataforma para o gerenciamento de projetos

Agile Methods are advocated as a way of producing better software. Advocates of agile methods suggest that practices such as keeping in close communication with your customers, frequent integration, and frequent assessment of project status will enable us to produce software that has value for the customer - quality software. It's hard to argue with that. But why is this any different than simply "good" software development practice? Why does saying "Scrum" "Agile" or "XP" grab peoples' attention? Why does it take a name for useful practices to be accepted.This panel will help us understand the role of hype in getting useful practices accepted or rejected. We will explore why it is that these good ideas have not been more widely used. Some of the questions that the panel and the audience will explore are: Why do we ignore proven practices until we see them packaged as a "method?" Can we do something different in the workplace or in school to teach these practices? Or is it the case that these practices are not universally good?This panel talks about agility in a different context than what is typical: we won't just discuss what agile practices are. We will explore why they are not more widely adopted, especially when not packaged as part of a "named" method like XP. And we will discuss why projects suffer even when the methods that can help them are well known. This panel will provide an entertaining and thought provoking forum for discussing an issue that is ever present in the world of technology: the role of hype. We concentrate on agile practices, moving beyond simply enumerating them, to discussing why they are not more widely adopted.

Ken Schwaber

Papers

What's so eXtreme about doing things right?