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Some of the biggest problems I found in teaching in an undergraduate computing degree were:

• Students are naturally bad at requirements gathering and analysis. It's generally not their fault as these skills come with age and experience. The current solution: specify requirements explicitly up front.

• Likewise, software design is also a skill that is difficult to "teach". I think we develop an eye for good/poor design through exposure to sufficient amounts of both. At undergraduate level, design is usually imposed from upon high for these reasons. Little scope is provided for reflecting on qualitative differences in implementation.

• Assessing individual acquired knowledge over the course of a subject is difficult given the ease with which software can be copied, modified and re-distributed. Traditional formal assessment techniques like exams are a poor indicator of a student's ability to develop software. Further complicating this issue in most computing degrees is the large number of students from countries where the cultural norm is for most learning to be done in private study groups.

  At my university, we placed great emphasis on one-on-one student interviews at the end of each subject to accurately determine how much each student has taken on during the subject.

• Students, like professional developers, have an active dislike for documentation in all forms. They have an inherent sense for the YAGNI nature of this form of deliverable. Therefore, requiring traditional documented deliverables for specifications and test plans is problemmatic.

Wih little effort, I can see existing XP practices tailorable to address each of these issues.

Customer Acceptance Tests

In a classroom, the teacher is the customer-proxy. Therefore, it's expected in an XP world that the customer specify the acceptance criteria for the work they're requesting. If students had a complete set of automated acceptance tests for their assignment work, it would certainly curtail the endless series of "I think I'm finished, but I'm not sure..." statements I was peppered with towards the end of each assignment. The immediate feedback this mechanism provides would greatly reduce the need for the inspection of the teacher to ensure completeness.

Pair Programming

Given most student's learn best with their peers, pair programming should be encouraged at all times during their study.

• Ensure tutorial sizes are roughly 2n where n is the number of workstations in the lab.

• Enforce pair changes frequently in the semester to open students to a wide variety of programming styles, and prevent "remora" behaviour where astute but unmotivated students attach themselves to the high-performing developers for the duration of the subject.

• Continue to conduct individual interviews to assess each student's amount of individual learning.

Refactoring

Given students don't have a natural feel for good program design, let them churn out the simplest thing that could possibly work on their first attempt and then allocate assessment criteria for some form of refactoring. Where possible, use automated metric reporting to give them immediate feedback that their changes are increasing/decreasing code quality, but also use some form of subjective tutor-based assessment to enforce the fact that not all quality can be codified by tools.

Automated unit tests

Let students generate and use an automated unit test suite in place of a written test plan. Ditto for design documentation: tools such as YDoc, OptimalAdvisor (the tool formerly known as Pasta) and others automatically derive design information from the codebase, reducing the need to produce copious reams of spurious and doomed-to-be-obsolete written documentation.

There are a whole swag of other XP concepts which would also work well in a classroom environment (e.g., Continuous Integration, automatically enforced coding standards, week = iteration, etc), but I would triage the four major point above to the top of my list given the opportunity.

Now, if only a teaching position came with a consultant's salary :-)