Would it be cheating to say we did things we didn't in teamwork project report?

Question

I am studying an undergrad CS course about agile project management. We are supposed to create a project using agile techniques and document how we did it.

The project is finished, but some people on my team want to say we did things we didn't do to gain extra points, like write user stories we didn't use or produce low fidelity prototypes and say we used them to get to our solution.

The course is not the best. There is little instruction or direction. The only reference to agile is 1 chapter in the assigned reading, so we had to learn ourselves agile while creating the project. From what we have learned we now see we missed things.

Would it be cheating to do this? It feels dishonest. I would preferably say what we relly did, what we missed and what we would do differently, but they don't want to. We can submit individual reports instead of as a team, but I would be throwing them under the bus if I did that and was honest.

Answer 1

I assume that your professor would treat any form of dishonesty as cheating. And, your colleagues seem to understand that or they wouldn't be suggesting it.

I would tell the team that you intend to be honest with the professor. They may not be happy, but the "stick" held over their head may be enough to get them to "do the right thing".

You can describe what you did. But you can also describe why you didn't do some other things, including no real guidance or insufficient understanding. You aren't intended, in a first course, to be able to perform like professionals. If you lie about what you did, then you learn nothing. If you are honest then the "retrospective" on the project is a learning experience.

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Note that Retrospective is one of the typical agile practices. Not every agile project in the real world turns out well, often because people didn't really follow agile practice.