Analyzing Effectiveness of Workshops for Learning Agile Development Principles

Workshops are sometimes known as effective ways to learn the human and social factors of software engineering. However, their effectiveness in learning agile development principles in particular has not yet been determined, despite the fact that numerous agile development workshops have been held over the years. In this paper, we analyze the effectiveness of agile development workshops through an experiment, and show that one of representative workshops is indeed effective at learning agile principles. Self-study is another commonly used method to learn something new. Therefore, we compare the effectiveness of workshops with that of self-study to better illustrate the effectiveness of agile development workshops. In our experiment, we examine 7 workshop subjects and 8 self-study subjects, and compare their scores on the agile mind check, which is a method used to measure their degree of mastery of agile principles. As a result, we demonstrate the effectiveness of agile development workshops, especially those that simulate actual experiences. We also show that one of workshops is more effective than self-study regarding the agile mind check score.