Experimenting with Event-B and Scrum on Student Project Course

Agile methodologies and frameworks are present in IT field for over 15 years now. Coming from industry, they reached research and teaching at the academia, to finally be utilised in the student projects. Formal methods, on the other hand, exist for over 40 years and constantly iterate between the needs of industry and the resources provided by university research. Nonetheless, they seem to remain difficult to be taught and learnt. Thus, usually, they are placed as a separate learning module, not re-used between courses.Student projects can be thought of as small ecosystems combining the learning methods required by the given project with the application of knowledge and skills gathered so far. This paper presents a student project, which was executed within a Project Course throughout 7 months. The project was combining the Vaadin framework (UI), Event-B formal method (proving system properties) and Scrum (development process) in order to create a web-application. The course was mimicking the real-world environment, where a Team of developers is having an industrial customer to whom a functional system needs to be delivered.Our contribution is two-fold and encompasses observations and recommendations regarding (i) the use of Scrum in student projects and (ii) the application of formal methods in "traditional" software development in the student context.