Case study: Employing Agile Tools in Teaching Product Development to Mechatronics Students

Agile tools such as Git are widely used in the industry for source control, collaboration and documentation. Such tools have been implemented in a mechatronic product development course to allow for easier collaboration between students. The course content is mainly provided using a GitLab Pages webpage which hosts software documentation and scripts. This course was first changed in 2019 to include the development of an autonomous strawberry picker. However, the use of standard learning management system and lecture slides provided a cumbersome experience for the students. Therefore, these agile tools were presented in 2020 version to improve the course. In this paper, the course content is detailed, and student feedback from both years are discussed to reveal the outcome of the changes.