Context: Cultural aspects are of high importance as they guide people’s behaviour and thus, influence how people apply methods and act in projects. In recent years, software engineering research emphasized the need to analyze the challenges of specific cultural characteristics. Investigating the influence of cultural characteristics is challenging due to the multi-faceted concept of culture. People’s behaviour, their beliefs and underlying values are shaped by different layers of culture, e.g., regions, organizations, or groups. In this study, we focus on agile methods, which are agile approaches that focus on underlying values, collaboration and communication. Thus, cultural and social aspects are of high importance for their successful use in practice. Objective: In this paper, we address challenges that arise when using the model of cultural dimensions by Hofstede to characterize specific cultural values. This model is often used when discussing cultural influences in software engineering. Method: As a basis, we conducted an exploratory, multiple case study, consisting of two cases in Japan and two in Germany. Contributions: In this study, we observed that cultural characteristics of the participants differed significantly from cultural characteristics that would typically be expected for people from the respective country. This drives our conclusion that for studies in empirical software engineering that address cultural factors, a case-specific analysis of the characteristics is needed.

Agile methods are well-known approaches in software development and used in various settings, which may vary wrt. organizational size, culture, or industrial sector. One important facet for the successful use of agile methods is the strong focus on social aspects. We know, that cultural values influence the behaviour of humans. Thus, an in-depth understanding of the influence of cultural aspects on agile methods is necessary to be able to adapt agile methods to various cultural contexts. In this paper we focus on an enabler to this problem. We want to better understand the influence of cultural factors on agile practices. The core contribution of this paper is MoCA: A model describing the impact of cultural values on agile elements.

This Innovative Practice Full Paper examines the integration of Professional Scrum Trainings (PST) into an undergraduate class. The PST was integrated into the IT project management course in 2016. The course deals with challenges in IT projects, agile project management, intercultural project teams and IT project controlling. It is held in the Bachelor of Science programs Business Information Systems and Electronic Government, which is provided by the department of business computing at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts -Hochschule Hannover in Germany. We integrate PSTs into the course with the aim to provide the opportunity to our students of a deep dive into the most commonly used agile method Scrum. Also, we collaborated with visiting lecturers from the industry mainly to include practice-relevant problems, challenges, and examples to the students. We prepared, planned, and performed the integration of the PST since 2016 in every term, except the summer term in 2020 due to Covid-19 reasons. This paper presents our approach to integrate PSTs as Scrum seminars into an undergraduate course in higher education. We also analyzed how the students value the integration of PSTs into the IT project management course. Based on our experience and learnings including the quantitative evaluation data, which we conduct regularly, we describe that the students value attending a PST in their studies and benefit from specific experiences related to Scrum in practice. The results include both, classroom and virtual distance teaching during Covid-19. Furthermore, we give three recommendations for other lecturers, which are interested integrating PSTs into their teaching activities. The recommendations refer to the collaboration with professionals from practice, the importance of providing practical relevant knowledge to the students and the possibility of integrating certification providers to the integrated PST. Thus, the paper contributes to an understanding how to integrate agile methods and professional trainings into a higher education context both in the classroom and virtual distance teaching environments.

This Innovative Practice Full Paper presents our learnings of the process to perform a Master of Science class with eduScrum integrating real world problems as projects. We prepared, performed, and evaluated an agile educational concept for the new Master of Science program Digital Transformation organized and provided by the department of business computing at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts - Hochschule Hannover in Germany. The course deals with innovative methodologies of agile project management and is attended by 25 students. We performed the class due the summer term in 2019 and 2020 as a teaching pair. The eduScrum method has been used in different educational contexts, including higher education. During the approach preparation, we decided to use challenges, problems, or questions from the industry. Thus, we acquired four companies and prepared in coordination with them dedicated project descriptions. Each project description was refined in the form of a backlog (list of requirements). We divided the class into four eduScrum teams, one team for each project. The subdivision of the class was done randomly. Since we wanted to integrate realistic projects into industry partners' implementation, we decided to adapt the eduScrum approach. The eduScrum teams were challenged with different projects, e.g., analyzing a dedicated phenomenon in a real project or creating a theoretical model for a company's new project management approach. We present our experiences of the whole process to prepare, perform and evaluate an agile educational approach combined with projects from practice. We found, that the students value the agile method using real world problems. However, the results are mainly based on the summer term 2019, this paper also includes our learnings from virtual distance teaching during the Covid 19 pandemic in summer term 2020. The paper contributes to the distribution of methods for higher education teaching in the classroom and distance learning.