Developing a CDS with Scrum in an interdisciplinary academic project

During the 2^nd semester of 2013, at the Brazilian Aeronautics Institute of Technology (Instituto Tecnologico de Aeronautica - ITA), a successful Interdisciplinary Problem Based Learning (IPBL) experience took place. At that time, almost 70 undergraduate and graduate students from 4 different courses within just 17 academic weeks had the opportunity of conceptualizing, modeling, and developing an Avionics Real-Time Embedded System (ARTES) with Cockpit Display Systems (CDS) for a fictitious Unmanned Aircraft Vehicle (UAV). This intensive and collaborative academic project has used the Scrum agile method and its best practices, and the Safety-Critical Application Development Environment (SCADE) from Esterel Technologies. This experience was stored in a Google site and implemented as a Proof of Concept (PoC). It represents just one example of how to solve the old problem of teaching and learning complex real-time avionics embedded systems, by collaboratively using the Scrum agile method with SCADE, a state of the art integrated CASE tool environment. Its main results are reported in this paper.