Learning Agile Scrum Methodology Using the Groupware Tool Trello® Through Collaborative Working

Agile is a project management philosophy for collaborative working which consists of a set of values and principles that can be employed in any sector. It is adopted by the software development community a long time ago and now several methodologies based on agile principles have become established as a method of software development. These agile based software development methodologies have developed as an integral part of the software engineering and software development curricula for many computing degree courses. One such agile based methodology is Scrum which is widely used in the software industry and thus in teaching. Several agile Scrum tools are available for software development, however, for teaching and learning purposes, this would not be affordable for many institutions due to its cost or learning curve. This necessitates the requirement for a free or open-source Scrum tool without any learning curve. Trello which is a free project management and collaborative working tool but not particularly designed for Scrum. However, its functionality and features can be transformed to make it a basic Scrum tool for teaching and learning purposes at no cost. This paper presents a systematic development and application of Trello-based agile Scrum methodology not just for teaching and learning purposes but for real project development. It is employed in the delivery of the software engineering module in BSc courses and subsequently, in the development of the BSc final year project at Bournemouth University, UK. This implementation of Trello-based agile Scrum methodology in the project development is compared against the simple agile Scrum based project development practice to demonstrate the success and learning improvement of this proposed methodology.