Three years of design-based research to reform a software engineering curriculum

Luukkainen, Matti; Vihavainen, Arto; Vikberg, Thomas

doi:10.1145/2380552.2380613

Cited by 13 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…One of the challenges was to design an approach to assess not only project deliverables and productivity, but also performance in terms of tacit and team skills. The lessons learned in the Software Factory were incorporated, together with results from a multi-year improvement effort [14], into the Software Engineering Project.…”

Section: B Motivation and Learning Objectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Peer assessment in experiential learning Assessing tacit and explicit skills in agile software engineering capstone projects

Fagerholm

Vihavainen

2013

2013 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)

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To prepare students for real-life software engineering projects, many higher-education institutions offer courses that simulate working life to varying degrees. As software engineering requires not only technical, but also inter-and intrapersonal skills, these skills should also be assessed. Assessing soft skills is challenging, especially when project-based and experiential learning are the primary pedagogical approaches. Previous work suggests that including students in the assessment process can yield a more complete picture of student performance. This paper presents experiences with developing and using a peer assessment framework that provides a 360-degree view on students' project performance. Our framework has been explicitly constructed to accommodate and evaluate tacit skills that are relevant in agile software development. The framework has been evaluated with 18 bachelors-and 11 masters-level capstone projects, totaling 176 students working in self-organized teams. We found that the framework eases teacher workload and allows a more thorough assessment of students' skills. We suggest including self-and peer assessment into software capstone projects alongside other, more traditional schemes like productivity metrics, and discuss challenges and opportunities in defining learning goals for tacit and social skills.

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Section: B Motivation and Learning Objectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Peer assessment in experiential learning Assessing tacit and explicit skills in agile software engineering capstone projects

Fagerholm

Vihavainen

2013

2013 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)

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“…Although challenges apply to traditional teaching methods [15,16], some challenges are best met with hands-on experience [14]. Project-based teaching of software engineering is not new [2,5,10,13]. Recently, SE courses with more control over processes and practices, and less control over programming and tools have been reported: For example, Mahnic et al described the experience of giving a strict guideline for teaching Scrum in a Slovenian capstone project [10].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Lecturers often struggle to ensure both lucid research-based lectures and a smooth large-scale lab operation. SE courses risk ending up with outdated practices and technology no longer in use [5], so detailed training in tools and methods may age quickly and become a career obstacle rather than an asset. The backbone of our SE-course is a project-based lab-course where students work in agile teams, interspersed with this, we lectures on theory, tools and technology [8,9,10,21].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unreined Students or Not: Modes of Freedom in a Project-Based Software Engineering Course

Nytrø

Nguyen-Duc

Tratteberg

et al. 2020

2020 IEEE 32nd Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T)

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Software engineering courses include practical and theoretical elements that give many options for pedagogical combinations among them. In this paper, we report on two different pedagogical approaches for an undergraduate, introductory project-based software engineering course with more than 500 students working in collaborative scrum teams. We call one approach 'Every Student is an Innovator', and the other 'No Student Left Behind'. This SE course has been long-running, with stable learning objectives and content. However, from one year to another, we radically changed the pedagogical approach of the course along several dimensions, among them the technical framework, software tools, project topic, mentor roles, assessment form and frequency, feedback and degree of student innovativeness. We report on the perceived challenges, detailed changes, the anticipated effects on the course learning outcomes. The results showed that innovativeness and fun need freedom and flexibility with processes and technology. However, strict design requirements and systematic guidance ensure fulfillment of learning objectives. Analyzing student and staff feedback, we find that both approaches lead to students using more time than intended and worrying about unknown assessment criteria.

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“…Luukkainen et al have worked for three years and updated their curricula gradually to fine tune it in order to improve the student's readiness for the practices in the industry [28]. The resulting curriculum has courses that are linked strongly together, building on a theme of ideas across them.…”

Section: ) the Industrymentioning

confidence: 99%

Perspectives on the Gap Between the Software Industry and the Software Engineering Education

Oğuz

2019

IEEE Access

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The gap between the software industry and software engineering education was first mentioned three decades ago, in 1989. Since then, its existence has been regularly reported on and solutions to close it have been proposed. However, after thirty years this gap resists all efforts for closure. In this study we assert that the gap between industry and academia exists for several reasons that are related and intertwined. To take a broader look at the problem from the perspective of all related entities, we (i) provide a detailed overview of the profession and identify the entities, (ii) extract the causes that stem from these entities and discuss what each entity should do, (iii) report and analyze the results of a questionnaire that has been conducted with students and recent graduates, (iv) emphasize the highlights of the interviews conducted with students, recent graduates and academics, (v) and compile a list of skills that are sought by the industry by analyzing the software engineering job advertisements. We further contribute to finding solutions by considering all entities involved, which provides an opportunity to access all of them, so that each can find out what they can do to acknowledge and narrow the gap. Our study concludes that the gap requires constant attention and hard work for all of the entities involved, and therefore all should be on the lookout for new technologies, learn to embrace the changes and adapt to them, so that the gap is kept at a minimum. INDEX TERMS Software engineering education, education gap, engineering curriculum. Ph.D. degree in information technologies from

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Three years of design-based research to reform a software engineering curriculum

Cited by 13 publications

References 13 publications

Peer assessment in experiential learning Assessing tacit and explicit skills in agile software engineering capstone projects

Peer assessment in experiential learning Assessing tacit and explicit skills in agile software engineering capstone projects

Unreined Students or Not: Modes of Freedom in a Project-Based Software Engineering Course

Perspectives on the Gap Between the Software Industry and the Software Engineering Education

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