Agile Project Management in Scalable Team-Based Senior Capstone Design Experiences

Increasing enrollments in physics majors with required senior research projects often places unsustainable demands on a constant number of research faculty. At William & Mary we piloted several formats of scalable team-based senior design experiences for our new Engineering Physics and Applied Design track. We developed these scalable approaches to enable 3- to 5-person teams to work on physics design experiences outside the areas of research expertise of one faculty supervisor, with clear users outside the department, and with a management structure to allow individual assessment. Agile project management, an iterative and incremental approach to development, has turned out to be particularly effective. We work with month-long sprints. At the start the team plans the tasks to be completed on a tracking board. During the sprints the team meets for frequent 10-minute stand-up meetings. At the end the team demonstrates the incremental progress and sets the goals for the next sprint.