Developing Industrial Cases for Teaching Software Engineering – A Lesson Learned

Abstract

Software engineers are provided with an enormous choice of technology for improving the quality of software. Being intangible, software products tend to be more intricate to build than any other artifacts. The selection of technology can thus become a critical factor for the success of software development. Software engineers are expected to be well-versed in various technologies to enable them to decide the best one for a particular development project. Sensible decisions however require not only understanding but also active minds, which can be achieved through meaningful learning. Being a discussion-based learning approach that encourages students to exploit knowledge and understanding of the subject matter, the Case Method seems to be a practical teaching and learning option. This method entails developing specific cases that promote exploration and critical thinking. To ensure the developed cases are useful, they should be evaluated. This paper presents a practical methodology for developing as well as evaluating industrial cases for teaching software engineering through the Case Method. It also shares some important lessons learned from the process. These lessons act as a guideline for future case developers to compose useful cases and motivate software engineering instructors to use cases in teaching.

A Guideline of Using Case Method in Software Engineering Courses

“…Previous studies on CM in SE were either about case development (Hilburn & Towhidnejad, 2007;Razali, Zainal, & Chitsaz, 2012) or case usage in T&L SE (Garg & Varma, 2007Varma & Garg, 2005). For the www.ccsenet.org/ies International Education Studies Vol.…”

“…It would be an added advantage to the discussions if the instructors possess several years of work experience in industry (Hilburn & Towhidnejad, 2007). As guidance to the instructors, teaching cases are usually equipped with teaching notes that contains the main and supplementary resources to help instructors deliver and conduct CM (Razali, Zainal, & Chitsaz, 2012).…”

“…Cases should be equipped with teaching notes (Razali, Zainal, & Chitsaz, 2012). Teaching notes contain teaching objectives, reading resources, best practices in handling discussions, model questions and answers as well as any related supporting documents such as software project artefacts.…”

“…The elements of Case Preparation were obtained from the earlier study (Razali, Zainal, & Chitsaz, 2012) whilst CM Implementation were gathered from various sources, as described in Section 2 (Garg & Varma, 2007;Jianmin & Jian, 2010). This aspect links the Environment and Product aspects.…”