ADAPTATION OF AGILE METHODOLOGIES FOR REMOTE WORK IN THE IT INDUSTRY AND PROJECT-BASED E-LEARNING EDUCATION DURING THE PANDEMIC

Under the COVID-19 pandemic, the IT industry and higher education abruptly shifted from conventional in-office to remote work and distant learning. For professional agile IT teams, this rapid turn has not been as difficult as for higher education with its traditional offline formats. The main challenge of remote work has been overcoming the lack of face-to-face interaction to effectively communicate, collaborate, motivate, inform, and make presentations. Using advances in communication technology, the IT industry has successfully adapted the Agile processes to stay productive in the remote-work environment. One of the main tasks of higher engineering education is to teach students practical skills to help them integrate into the industry. Before the pandemic, the Moscow Polytechnical University introduced several new practice-oriented IT programs to prepare students with practical skills of project teamwork based on agile principles. The pandemic presented some program challenges because education has switched to distance e-learning. This paper describes how IT students and educators in the IT Department at the Moscow Polytechnical University adapted Agile practices for distant e-learning and remote teamwork on the assigned projects. It compares it to how the US professional IT teams modified Agile methods to fit their remote work.