On the use of SCRUM for the management of practcal projects in graduate courses

The premises considered by this work are that projects development in graduate courses is important for knowledge consolidation. However, one of the problems is that, usually, students are not prepared to manage and to be managed. This situation causes higher effort waste and is time-consuming. Additionally, the quality is decreased due to poor self-management and inadequate division of activities. Such problems can be minimized if there is a management policy that provides a wider vision of the project´s course, allowing the problems to be anticipated in such a way as to correct the flaws as soon as possible. This work proposes the adaptation of the SCRUM Agile Project Management Methodology in the context of the development of academic projects, both in undergraduate and graduate courses, where students are organized in small teams and execute the project in a systematic way. This method was applied during the practical part of the ¿real-time systems¿ course, whose project was the development of an automated industrial production line with robot arms, using the LEGO NXT robotic kit. Therefore, this paper will show implementation aspects of the proposed method, difficulties and solutions, which parts of Scrum were effectively adopted and, specially, the learnt lessons.