Vidya Kumbhar 1 and Kanchan Shrotriya 2

Transcription

1 Computing For Nation Development, March 10 11, 2011 Bharati Vidyapeeth s Institute of Computer Applications and Management, New Delhi Applying Scrum Practices to Improvise Placement Process of Prospective Employees Vidya Kumbhar 1 and Kanchan Shrotriya 2 1,2 Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies & Research (SICSR), Pune 1 vidya173@gmail.com and 2 kanchan_shrot@yahoo.com ABSTRACT Agile software development represents a major changeover in the era of software development practices. With rapid growth of implementation of agile methodology in the software industry, Agile is becoming a more matured and effective approach and has a wide acceptance. After being widely used in the software, manufacturing, sociology and education domain, the right agile methodology needs to be identified for the placement activity of the students in the Indian education system. This paper focuses on adopting the scrum frame work, one of the agile methodologies in the placement activity of the students pursuing education in India. have already marked their names among the top higher educational institutes of the world.india is today one of the fastest developing countries of the world with the annual growth rate going above 9%. In order to sustain that rate of growth, there is need to increase the number of institutes and also the quality of higher education in India.[4]. Present situation of higher education for the year [5] KEYWORDS Higher Education, Placement, Agile Methodology, Scrum Framework 1. INTRODUCTION Higher education in India is pioneer brick to sustain in globalization. India, now in 2011 has grown in a remarkable way, to become one of the largest systems of its kind in the world. Only higher education will not help the students to sustain in the global market but the knowledge they gain has to be applied in the real world and so the education system remains incomplete without effective and the right kind of placement. Indian education system focuses more on the knowledge delivery as compared to the application of the delivered knowledge which can be evaluated through the right placement.[1] Placement activity in the Indian education system does not follow any defined methodology and it appears to be a sidelined activity. The impact of implementing methodologies is evident enough looking into the growth in software development and other industrial applications. [2]. Agile software development represents a major changeover in the era of software development practices. With rapid growth of implementation of agile methodology in the software industry, Agile is becoming a more matured and effective approach and has a wide acceptance according to the recently published trends. [3] After being widely used in the software, manufacturing, sociology and education domain, the right agile methodology needs to be identified for the placement activity of the students in the Indian education system. 2. HIGHER EDUCATION IN INDIA There is a considerable improvement in the higher education scenario of India in both quantitative and qualitative terms. In technical education, the IITs, and in management, the IIMs Table1.1 (Source: - Annual Report Department of School Education & Literacy Department of Higher Education Ministry of Human Resource Development Government of India) At the beginning of the academic year , the total number of students enrolled, in the formal system, in the Universities and Colleges has been reported at lakhs lakhs (12.24%) in University Departments and lakhs (87.76%) in affiliated colleges. 3. CURRENT SITUATION OF PLACEMENT OF STUDENTS IN INDIAN HIGHER EDUCATION SYSTEM Placement activity is not found being considered as a part and parcel of the Indian education system. A large diversity is found in student placement all over India. Major reasons for lack of proper placement are listed here: 1. Gap in Academic knowledge delivery and industry requirements. 2. Geographical diversification of students. 3. Academic excellence is judged by merit and not by the percentage of placement. 4. Institutions sidelines placement activity as compared to knowledge delivery and evaluation. [4] 4. TRADITIONAL APPROACH TOWARDS PLACEMENT IN INDIAN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM

2 It has been observed that in particular to Indian placement, major time is utilized to groom up the students to attain the right placement. There by major focus is on the pre placement activity as compared to the actual placement. Therefore involvement of employer becomes minimal till the pre placement is over. At the end total time left out after pre placement is so little that there may be a mess up in the system at the peak time of placement. Fig 1: Sequence of placement Above model clearly appears rigid like the waterfall model and may not meet the changing requirements of the employer and hence this approach needs to be modified. Not all but some institutions in the Indian educational System have shown optimum progress in placement but the immediate and changing need and problems may not be handled effectively using above model. 5. THE AGILE APPROACH FOR PLACEMENT Agility, the customer centric approach, focuses on quality product delivered to the client at the right time the agile movement emphasizes the relationship and communality of software developers and the human role reflected in the contracts, as opposed to institutionalized processes and development tools. The vital objective of the software team is to continuously turn out tested working software. New releases are produced at frequent intervals, in some approaches even hourly or daily, but more usually bi-monthly or monthly.[5] From a business point of view, agile development is focused on delivering business value immediately as the project starts, thus reducing the risks of non-fulfillment regarding the contract. Scientific literature on the subject (Highsmith, 2002) suggests that the differences between traditional methodologies and Agile Methodologies rely on two main assumptions: 1. First, traditional methodologies assume that customers do not know their requirements, hence they need guidance from the developers, but Agile Methodologies assume that both customers and developers do not have full understanding of requirements when the project starts. Therefore, in traditional software development environments, developers want a detailed specification, whereas in Agile Methodologies customers and developers learn together about the system requirements as the development process evolves. 2. Second, traditional methodologies assume that customers ability to foresee their future requirements is limited, and as such developers have to build in extra functionalities to meet these future needs, often leading to overdesigned system. On the other hand, Agile Methodologies emphasize simplicity. 6. AGILE METHODOLOGIES.[6] The outline of Agile Methodologies was laid down by the Agile Manifesto, published by a group of software practitioners (Becket. al, 2001). Agile represents a group of software engineering methodologies which promise to deliver increased productivity, quality and project success rate overall in software development projects. Such methodologies are Extreme Programming (Beck 1999b), Scrum (Schwaber 1995; Schwaber and Beedle 2002), Crystal family of methodologies (Cockburn 2002a), Feature Driven Development (Palmer and Felsing 2002), the Rational Unified Process (Kruchten 1996; Kruchten 2000), Dynamic Systems Development Method (Stapleton 1997), Adaptive Software Development (Highsmith 2000) and Open Source Software development (e.g., O'Reilly 1999) [6] Also, these methodologies involve a set of best practices such as pair programming, continuous integration or daily deployments. While the traditional waterfall methodologies rely on a large number of documents and artifacts, SCRUM and the rest of Agile Methodologies use a minimum of documentation, just sufficient for the project to run under good conditions. Agile developers recognize that documentation is an intrinsic part of any system, the creation and maintenance of which is a necessary evil to some and an enjoyable task for others, an aspect of software development that can be made agile when you choose to do so. User stories are one of the primary development artifacts for Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP) project teams. A user story is a very high-level definition of a requirement, containing just enough information so that the developers can produce a reasonable estimate of the effort to implement it. Story building of agile is an effective technique to clearly understand requirements.[7] All these characteristics of agile methodologies can overcome current drawbacks of traditional placement process.

3 Applying Scrum Practices to Improvise Placement Process of Prospective Employees processes. The Scrum approach was defined in the mid 1990 s and is being used widely. Fig 2: Usage of different Agile Methodologies (Source:-State of Agile Survey 2009-Version One)[8] 6.1AGILE AND PLACEMENT Applying agile approach will bring a change over if applied to the placement.a comparative study of and traditional placement and agile placement approach: 7.1 APPLYING SCRUM IN PLACEMENT With the advent use of scrum in the placement activity, an increased collaboration in the stakeholders of the placement activity is foreseen. The Indian educational system implements an approach similar to the waterfall approach, which is rigid and sequential in nature that further results in the failure of acquiring the right kind of placement. A light weight process framework like scrum is recommended to improve the current scenario. Scrum is the most used practices of agile where the delivery time of the software may be short and entire work can be done in short cycles called Sprints. In a Sprint, the Team takes work from a prioritized list of items called a product Backlog. The items developed first are of highest value to the customer. Basic Scrum is composed of: three roles (The product owner, scrum master and scrum team), three activities (sprint planning, daily scrum, sprint review), and three artifacts (product backlog, sprint backlog and burn down chart) Table WHY SCRUM? As compared to the several agile methods, Scrum methodology is more suitable for short term software development and so for placement. It s clear from Figure 2 that SCRUM is the most used methodology of agile. Scrum is based on industryaccepted best practices, used and proven for decades. It is then set in an empirical process theory. Scrum is a simple project management framework which enables you to closely align your software development efforts with your company s evolving priorities. Over thousands of projects, Scrum has proven to be a highly productive approach to software development. Scrum helps reduce risk and ensures that the business guides development efforts at all times. Scrum increases productivity by bringing rigorous accountability and business alignment to your software development effort. The Scrum framework also reduces risk and builds a more transparent and trusting relationship between software development team and client: Scrum allows clients to change their mind and evolve their requirements during the development process. Scrum is a value-driven process and not plan driven like many traditional software development Fig. 3: Use Case Diagram for Placement Activity Similarly the placement cell in any Indian educational hub consists of a Placement officer, core placement team, and the Employer. This scenario is depicted in Figure 1.3 in the form of a Use case Diagram. We further propose to replace these role plays of existing placement activity with the three roles of the scrum framework for an improved delivery of the scrum product that means the prospective employee: Student 7.2. THE PROPOSED SCRUM FRAMEWORK FOR PLACEMENT Scrum s simple project management framework ensures that a motivated team is always working on the client s most important features. Frequent, high-bandwidth feedback cycles between team and client, enable the team to adapt to the changes in requirements. Scrum teams work in iterations of between one and four weeks. 1. Each iteration delivers deployable code based on rigorous quality assurance. 2. The business determines what features are developed, each iteration ensuring they maximize project ROI

4 3. All work is taken off a single list of remaining work, prioritized by business value and easily visible and understood by stakeholders. 7.3 SCRUM BASICS WHEN APPLIED TO PLACEMENT Any placement cell can use Scrum. Entire placement work is done in short cycles called Sprints. In a Sprint, the core team takes work from a prioritized list of items like employer information, placement requirement called a Backlog. Basic Scrum is composed of: three roles, three activities, and three artifacts. 7.4 COMPARISON SCRUM IN SOFTWARE INDUSTRY WITH SCRUM IN PLACEMENT. In short a placement cell with the product owner as the employer, the scrum master as the placement head and the scrum team as the core placement team will now benefit with increased employer interaction, quick review and easily available backup documents along with the current status of work through the burnout charts. With the placement process of number of candidates with as employer, the peer review will control the actions of the succeeding sprint. Changing needs of employers can be met through product backlog. Sprint backlog may be used for the next sprint placement. This will reduce the gap of patching up with the immediate or the changing need of the employer. Because of the retrospective and daily scrums, there will be a clarity of team work outcome and shortcomings. This will also introduce a transparency in the core team and the placement office. As not found in the traditional approach. Successful implementation of the proposed model will enhance placement and that will further make the Indian educational system a complete system. REFERENCES [1]. [2]. [3]. Agile Alliance, [4]. [5]. Beck, K., et.al, Manifesto for Agile Software Development, [6]. [7]. management-and-marketing/66.pdf [8]. velopment_survey_results.pdf [9]. [10]. Guide.pdf [11]. Agile Software Development By Cockburn, Alistair Singapore / Pearson Education Pvt.Ltd. / 2002 xxv, 278 p. [12]. Dr. Venkatesh Kamat,(2008)," experience of using agile in the education process, the Agile Goa conference. [13]. Beck, K., et.al, Manifesto for Agile Software Development, 8. CONCLUSION The fast growing iterative and prioritized approach of scrum will definitely boom the results of student placement in shorter duration of time. Not only the placement will grow but the quality and collaborations will increase globally. Effective placement will further motivate the society towards an increased interest in acquiring higher education in India. 9. FUTURE SCOPE The proposed framework of scrum to be applied in the placement cells can be reworked with added artifacts and can be enhanced further for the HR's recruitment process for any level of management. A differentiator factor needs to be identified between the scrum methodology and placement activity. This model may be applicable in an environment that is in need of urgent recruitment or student placement. Whereas, for a planned placement activity, the pre placement activities are well organized the year through and hence they may implement the hybrid framework to be derived from the developed to match average placement needs. Fig 4: SCRUM Framework for Placement

5 Applying Scrum Practices to Improvise Placement Process of Prospective Employees Table 1.3 Roles in Scrum Framework Table 1.5 Artifacts in Scrum Framework Table1.4 Activities in Scrum Framework