The 78th Installment
Full Scale Measures for the Learning of Agile Development with the AIIT enPiT Program
By Yoshihide Chubachi,
Associate Professor, Master Program of Information Systems Architecture
The AIIT enPiT program, which began in FY2012 and opened up fully in FY2013 is about to end its third year. During this time, along with various repeated improvements, there has been an effort to provide an educational place for learning practical expertise, mainly about agile software development. This program, supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology will take a break in the next fiscal year. In this column, I would like to describe some of the features of the three-year enPiT program so far.
Overall, the enPiT program was implemented with a focus on 15 universities throughout the country (Osaka University, Tohoku University, University of Tsukuba, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Nagoya University, Kobe University, Kyushu University, Kyushu Institute of Technology, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Future University Hakodate, Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology, Keio University, Institute of Information Security). These universities were divided into four fields (cloud computing, security, embedded systems and business applications), each with their own distinctive style of education.
AIIT was involved in the business application field, together with the University of Tsukuba and Future University Hakodate. The aim was to improve the abilities of practicing engineers working on the development of business applications now and into the future. At the universities, as mentioned, the focus in recent years has been on education on agile development. Interest in agile development is also growing in industry, but it is often difficult to introduce because of a lack of practical experience and the difficulty in shifting from conventional development processes in companies. An opportunity was presented here to open to door for workers with such concerns to educate them with practical expertise.
Scrum is one of the agile development methodologies. It incorporates the concept of lean start-up from the planning stage of business applications, in advance of development. The PBL also thoroughly reviews the “Demo or die” method incorporating the concept of the hackathon.
This Demo or die concept could be considered as one of the most significant features of this program. For weekly reviews, the most important element is the demonstration that software actually works, and presentation materials should not be prepared simply for the purpose of making a presentation. This is also an opportunity to confirm raw data such as from the GitHub commit log and continuous integration automated test results, and to make a serious presentation which doesn’t brush over the facts.
In addition to the scrum course mentioned above, our university enPiT also offered a global course. The aim with this course is to cultivate personnel that can work globally, and projects have been executed in collaboration with leading universities in Vietnam, Brunei and New Zealand. Software and IoT devices are developed which capture differing market needs in the various locations, going beyond just the Japanese way of thinking. Naturally, communication is carried out in English, and engineers are also trained in the necessary language skills.
Finally, there is also a need for the educators that provide this cutting-edge education to be continuously learning. Educators in the business application field met together voluntarily and engaged in FD activities. Last summer (FY2015) educators in various fields gathered at Future University Hakodate to hold an FD training camp on the theme of improving PBL, together with scrum coaching. Educators have also held two Lightning Talk Conferences at the university. These kinds of approaches also deepened cooperation between educators. As I mentioned above, the enPiT project will be taking a break in the next fiscal year, but it is my hope that such connections between educators will continue going forward, to deepen research into teaching methods for the cultivation of practical and advanced human resources.