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Scrum is an increasingly important project management framework that has had limited study in technical communication (TC) and TC classrooms. While research has found student collaborations to be both frustrating and challenging, it has found Scrum to be a scaffolding framework that can improve student interactions and outcomes. Therefore, to determine whether Scrum affects the peer assessments of collaborative teams as well as project grades, this quasi-experimental classroom study compares the midproject and postproject peer assessments and grades of advanced TC students who used Scrum as a framework for collaboration against those students who did not use Scrum in their collaborations. The study found that students who used Scrum rated their team members significantly higher on some peer assessment measures and earned significantly higher grades than did those students who did not use Scrum. Additionally, students in the Scrum protocol reported satisfaction with their group experience broadly but did not report satisfaction with Scrum itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of empathy in student team collaborations in technical and professional communication has been understudied. In this mixed methods study, we assess how Scrum affects both student perceptions of empathy and student use of empathetic strategies. We found that students who used Scrum considered themselves to be no more empathetic than students who did not use Scrum. However, a discourse analysis revealed that students who used Scrum deployed significantly more empathetic strategies than students who did not use Scrum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Although agile and Scrum have been important frameworks in software engineering for over a decade, little research has explored how teams use Scrum language within their sprints. Literature review: Most explorations of Scrum communication have been collected through self-reported means. These studies are inherently unable to explore how Scrum teams use Scrum-centric language in their meetings in ways that adhere or run counter to standard Scrum practice. Research questions: 1. In what ways is Scrum reflected in the language used by team members in various sprint meetings? 2. What associations exist between the job title of team members and their use of Scrum language? 3. What does a discourse analysis reveal about the ways in which this team uses language to value and discount Scrum? Research methodology: For three sprints over 10 weeks, I recorded meetings of 27 Scrum team members. I transcribed these meetings, developed a codebook for assigning Scrum language categories, conducted an interrater reliability agreement on the data, completed a correspondence analysis on how Scrum language associates with meeting types and job titles, and conducted a discourse analysis to determine in what ways these teams value and discount Scrum. Results/discussion: Scrum language was found in all recorded meetings across all three sprints, with much language found in the planning meetings. Few associations existed between Scrum language and job title, suggesting that Scrum at this engineering firm is an egalitarian process. In addition, the discourse analysis revealed that this engineering firm valued User Story and Sprint Execution language while discounting Capacity and Story Pointing language. Conclusions: Although this group broadly adheres to Scrum practices about 68% of the time, this study finds that several current standard components of Scrum are routinely discounted. This exploratory study suggests that more research into the in-situ use of Scrum language in engineering workplaces is necessary to better inform engineering professionals about the communicative expectations of Scrum and to better enable engineering communication educators to prepare future engineers for Scrum realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]