Board 423: Using Agile Principles for Cohort Building in a Graduate Software Engineering Program

This report describes an approach to building a cohort of students in a graduate software engineering program supported by the Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (S-STEM) Program of the National Science Foundation. We used many agile principles for building and sustaining the cohort, which is scaffolded around the students' academic studies and their simultaneous work on an externally sourced software development project. We discuss how the agile principles were applied in practice in this S-STEM project, how they helped build a cohesive student cohort, and how