Combining Behaviour-Driven Development with Scrum for Software Development in the Education Domain

Most of the Brazilian universities employ teaching-learning methodologies based on classic frontal lectures. The Medicine Programme of the Federal University of Sao Carlos (UFSCar) is an exception, since it employs active learning methodologies. The Educational and Academic Management System for Courses Based on Active Learning Methodologies (EAMS-CBALM) was built and it is currently used to support this programme, and has been made available for other programmes as well. This system was developed using Scrum, but during its development project it was often necessary to reconsider system behaviour scenarios, and consequently the product backlog items, mainly due to poor communication between the Product Owner (PO) and the development team. This paper discusses a case study in which Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) has been used in combination with Scrum to redesign some EAMS-CBALM components. The paper demonstrates that the communication between the PO and the development team can be improved by using BDD as a communication platform to unambiguously define system requirements and automatically generate test suites.