  Agile Software Development (ASD) methodology has become widely used in the
industry. Understanding the challenges facing software engineering students is
important to designing effective training methods to equip students with proper
skills required for effectively using the ASD techniques. Existing empirical
research mostly focused on eXtreme Programming (XP) based ASD methodologies.
There is a lack of empirical studies about Scrum-based ASD programming which
has become the most popular agile methodology among industry practitioners. In
this paper, we present empirical findings regarding the aspects of task
allocation decision-making, collaboration, and team morale related to the Scrum
ASD process which have not yet been well studied by existing research. We draw
our findings from a 12 week long course work project in 2014 involving 125
undergraduate software engineering students from a renowned university working
in 21 Scrum teams. Instead of the traditional survey or interview based
methods, which suffer from limitations in scale and level of details, we obtain
fine grained data through logging students' activities in our online agile
project management (APM) platform - HASE. During this study, the platform
logged over 10,000 ASD activities. Deviating from existing preconceptions, our
results suggest negative correlations between collaboration and team
performance as well as team morale.
