A Practical Approach to Align Research with Master's Level Courses

Abstract

Software Engineering is a discipline in computer sciences that covers different topics ranging from formal methods to practical topics. An essential part of Software Engineering is the organization and the management of software projects. From several studies we know that we master the "craftsmanship", which means coding, but suffer in the organizational topics, i.e. project or process management. Those topics are important to Software Engineering, however, they are rather boring for students, which makes it hard to enthuse them about such topics. During the last years we developed a teaching format that on the one hand covers those high-level and abstract topics and, on the other hand, provides students with the opportunity to have experiences, and lecturers to conduct research. In this paper we present a concept for courses that combines the classic teaching formats lecture, seminar and practical training into a new format that allows for interactive teaching as well as for conducting research. We contribute a blueprint, which can be implemented in further courses. We present experiences made in a first implementation in the area of software process management, and conclude the paper with a discussion and a teaching agenda.

Teaching software process modeling

“…In contrast to the approach presented here, the experimental treatments are usually engineering level processes and not process modeling or process management activities. Only few experiments exist that focus on process management aspects (e.g., [13], [14]).…”

“…The basic course design, which we presented in [14], was developed according to the demand to change the way software processes are taught. From our experience, which we made in university teaching as well as in professional trainings in an industry context, we re-designed our lecture to meet the requirements from Sect.…”

“…Our course design 3 is based on both, our experience in university teaching as well as industry workshops. We adopted the workshop-based approach in the university teaching to give students more space to gain practical experience, and on the other hand, to give researchers the opportunity to conduct research [14]. The course concept (Fig.…”

“…In terms of the SPLC model, the workshops cover the analysis, the conception, and the realization as tasks that can be done in a workshop slot of 90 or 180 minutes. 3) Scientific Parts: We also introduced a pattern for conducting research in the context of this lecture format [14] including experimentation and survey research.…”

Peer Review #1 of "Guidelines for using empirical studies in software engineering education (v0.1)"

“…The second example is an advanced course on agile software project management, which is also grounded in the general course pattern presented in Kuhrmann (2012). A detailed description of the course and data obtained from the experiments is provided in Kuhrmann et al (2014).…”