→ Click on this link to see the official evaluation results

The Extreme Programming Lab 2007 was perceived as being a very successful one. The participant in general enjoyed being part of the team and the character of the lab challenge (developing an adaptive mobile game) helped to raise the students' motivation. Stories, which mainly focused on research questions and whose contribution to the game development was not directly visible tend to be disliked.

For every aspect of the practical course, at least on of the students rated it “excellent” respectively “appropriate”. The most space for improvements might be in the usage of the wiki as a common knowledge base. Here, openness of the approach and the need for a general structure were sometimes counteracting. The same was criticized for the product architecture, as some students felt lost in a rapidly and parallel developing code structure.

XP-skills like testing, task-estimation, or pair-programming were developed by the participants, communication and programming skills have been supported by the lab as well. The use of English as a lab language didn't seem to be a problem for most of the participants.

The participants agreed that the preparation time upfront the lab was important and they felt prepared for the lab challenges. Nevertheless, no request to further extend the preparation phase could be identified and the introduction of more school-like tutoring before and during the lab was discouraged. The challenge for future labs is the improvement of using results from social feedback loops like the final iteration reflection. Here, students criticized that findings did not lead as much to changes in the following iterations as it might have been possible. Nevertheless, the preliminary preparation and the total execution of the lab were heavily lauded by all students and a continuation of the lab series was recommended.

for details about the responses, please see the results pdf document.