32. Teaching Scrum by Doing Scrum in Internships in South Africa to Prepare Interns for Agile Projects

Unemployment in South Africa is calculated to be approximately between 25 and 35% depending on whether or not one includes the number of people who are unemployed but not actively looking for a position. Even among people with some tertiary education, the unemployment rate is just under 20% and university graduates have an unemployment rate of approximately 7%. These high values have encouraged the South African Revenue Service to offer tax incentives to companies which maintain internships or learnerships. This paper looks specifically at how the Scrum Methodology can be introduced in internships in the IT industry to help prepare interns for Agile projects. Students who attend traditional programming courses are typically prepared for a Waterfall environment where the student is handed a specification and expected to write a program. Usually, students have never encountered an Agile environment during their training. This paper describes an internship which introduces Scrum during the internship by using Scrum in the internship itself.