Assessing the software process maturity of software engineering courses

Practical software engineering courses incorporate industrial clients to present a more realistic environment for the students. Clients introduce problem statements to students in the predevelopment phase. These documents describe the project's vision, scope, requirements, and acceptance criteria. An unreasonable trade-off between efficiency and creativity can lead to unfulfilled client expectations or very constrained creative space for students. In problem statements, a good balance between freedom and efficiency helps foster such a creative-friendly environment that facilitates creative thinking and innovative approaches. This paper describes a case study in a software engineering project course among 17 projects (with over 100 students) in the past two semesters with real industrial clients. We develop criteria to classify problem statements into three main types. Innovation and creativity are measured through self-evaluation surveys and project documentation. The findings show that a problem statement with a known problem, fewer than 15 requirements, and fewer than 30 constraint word occurrences has the highest potential to strike the balance to encourage creativity and achieve project success.

The University of Southern California (USC) teaches a two-semester real-client project course as a core course in USC's MSCS-SE (Master of Science in Computer Science and Software Engineering) degree program. The course has evolved rapidly, each year introducing many changes in order to satisfy the course stakeholder's win conditions. The course has also been our primary experimental testbed for evolving our MBASE (Model-Based Architecting and Software Engineering) model integration framework. In turn, this framework, along with the CRESST (Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing) cognitive demands analysis has served as an effective means of managing the course's rapid evolution. A further test of the framework has been its application to undergraduate software engineering project courses at other institutions. This paper provides a description and examples of USC's experience in constructing and evolving a family of software engineering project courses based on the MBASE software engineering model integration framework. A discussion of course needs, use of software engineering models, a description of MBASE, use of the CRESST model of learning objectives, course development and experiences are presented. The approach has been used successfully at Columbia University and to a lesser degree at other institutions. Much of the current and historical materials and resources described in this paper are freely available for educational use.

Coordination among developers has long been recognized as critical in software projects. One of the reasons for running large project software engineering courses is to teach students how to coordinate while working in a group; yet we have little understanding of how the students might fail or ways to assist them in learning this skill. Socio-technical congruence is a way to measure coordination based on the fit between communications among developers and the dependencies of the project. In this work-in-progress paper, we use a measure of socio-technical congruence to analyze the coordination in a student software engineering team. We found that congruence did not improve over time as has been shown for professional software teams. We then describe a proposed tool that uses socio-technical congruence measures to support and give advice to students who are learning how to effectively coordinate activities on a group project.

Most of the principles and concepts that need to be taught in Software Engineering courses are hard to share the realistic experiences because it is difficult to give the student practical exposure to the insight and processes involved. This paper presents an innovative framework tailored for the establishment of an immersive learning environment within the context of a Software Engineering Project course. The overarching objective is to effectively tackle the inherent challenges associated with teaching intricate software engineering concepts, notably Agile Scrum and Team Software Process (TSPi). Conventional pedagogical approaches often prove inadequate in providing a comprehensive and engaging learning experience for students, educators and stakeholders. In response, our study introduces a pioneering immersive learning approach, offering a robust solution to this educational gap. To gauge the framework's efficacy and pertinence, we conducted online surveys, specifically targeting third-year students enrolled in the Software Engineering Laboratory course and the project stakeholders involved. These surveys were instrumental in collecting valuable feedback on the practicality and impact of our approach in enhancing the teaching and learning processes. This study presents a thorough exposition encompassing the framework's conceptualization, implementation and iterative evolution. Our research outcomes reveal that our immersive learning approach has successfully met the predefined course objectives, effectively addressing the intrinsic challenge of imparting hands-on experiences associated with software engineering principles and concepts. As a significant contribution to the ongoing initiatives aimed at elevating software engineering education, our study underscores the importance of providing students with tangible exposure to vital concepts such as Agile Scrum and TSPi. Moreover, this paper delineates the collaborative journey involved in the creation, execution and refinement of the course framework. Ultimately, our research endeavours to evaluate the degree to which our innovative framework aligns with the objectives established by both students and stakeholders. By doing so, it underscores the transformative potential of our approach in reshaping the landscape of software engineering education, ultimately enhancing its effectiveness and relevance.

We have taught several distributed software engineering project courses with students and real clients. During these projects, students in Pittsburgh and Munich, Germany collaborated in the development of a single system. Our experiences showed that software development is communication intensive and requires the collaboration of many stakeholders. Communication is challenging in distributed contexts: participants do not all know each other and work at different times and locations; the number of participants and their organization change during the project; and participants belong to different communities. Hence, to deal with the global marketplace, it is critical to provide students with distributed collaboration skills. To improve the teaching of collaboration in software engineering, we propose iBistro, an augmented, distributed, and ubiquitous communication space. iBistro aims to overcome problems resulting from miscommunications and information loss in informal or casual meetings. iBistro enables distributed groups to collaborate and cooperate in software projects and therefore provides an environment for learning in diverse aspects such as project management, programming skills, and social skills. With the addition of techniques from artificial intelligence, such as student modeling, and intelligent support mechanisms, such as computer supported group formation, distributed tutoring becomes feasible.

Software engineering project courses are highly valuable to students, but often require far too much work. This report discusses some methods for reducing the workload for students of such courses while retaining the important benefits.

In this paper, we present our efforts at incorporating aspects of systems security and software security into the two-course senior capstone project sequence (Software Engineering and Senior Project courses) in the undergraduate Computer Science curriculum at Jackson State University. In this regard, we discuss: (i) the development of course modules and lab projects on security that were respectively taught and assigned to the students in the two capstone project course sequence, and (ii) the incorporation of aspects of systems and software security in the capstone projects that were conducted by our students during the academic year 2010-11. To further assist students on their capstone projects, we developed and offered two new elective courses on Systems and Software Security and Advanced Information Security in conjunction with the two capstone project courses during the Fall and Spring semesters as well as incorporated a network security module, lab projects and reading assignment to a regular Computer Networks course. We disseminate all of our course modules, lecture materials and lab project descriptions through an actively maintained website. Our approach could be adopted as a model for incorporating security in the software systems design and development courses in a computer science or software engineering curriculum.

we taught an introductory software engineering

The premise of CTGDSD is that software engineering project courses where student teams are geographically distributed can effectively simulate the problems of globally distributed software development (DSD). However, while we see an increasing number of distributed project courses, this pedagogical model has proven difficult to adopt or sustain. It requires significant pedagogical resources and collaboration infrastructure. Institutionalizing such courses also requires compatible and reliable teaching partners. The CTGDSD workshop brings together faculty, industrial participants, and students to foster a community committed to developing, supporting, and teaching DSD. Foundational materials presented will include pedagogical materials and infrastructure developed and used in teaching distributed software development. Workshop participants will share their experiences, results, and lessons learned. Participants will also work together to identify and implement approaches to lowering adoption barriers including developing open source, common pedagogical materials, projects, and collaboration infrastructures. We expect to emerge from the workshop with a pool of potential teaching partners from around the globe and a framework for building a shared repository of useful materials.

More complex, diverse and innovative is the new norm in software products. To handle that, teams need to be heterogeneous and capable of performing teamwork – challenging those in higher education to understand factors that motivate or demotivate team-members. This article explores willingness and motivation of students to perform teamwork in a dynamic context scenario. After analyzing the team behavior in 60 real-world software projects, conducted in a software engineering course, we identified the factors that influence teamwork in such a dynamic context. These factors were used to create a model that can be reused by other instructors.

Software engineering project courses where student teams are geographically distributed can effectively simulate the problems of globally distributed software development (DSD). However, this pedagogical model has proven difficult to adopt or sustain. It requires significant pedagogical resources and collaboration infrastructure. Institutionalizing such courses also requires compatible and reliable teaching partners. The purpose of this workshop is to continue building on our outreach efforts to foster a community of international faculty and institutions committed to developing, teaching and researching DSD. Foundational materials presented will include pedagogical materials and infrastructure developed and used in teaching DSD courses along with results and lessons learned. The third CTGDSD workshop will also focus on publishing workshop results and collaborating with the larger DSD community. Longrange goals include: lowering adoption barriers by providing common pedagogical materials, collaboration infrastructure, and a pool of potential teaching partners from around the globe.

Selecting system and software requirements to implement in a particular product or release is a challenging decision problem. Business stakeholders strive to maximize return on investment by selecting the most valuable requirements for implementation. Deciding on the requirements to be selected entails a great deal of communication and coordination amongst the stakeholders to ascertain the priorities of the individual requirements. The prioritized requirements aid in the planning and sequencing of implementation activities associated with the software system and provides a basis of a prioritized backlog from which the requirements can be 'pulled' for development. Changing business priorities may require a complete reprioritization of the backlog, leading to wasted effort. Individual change requests and new requirements need to be prioritized and inserted into the correct location in the backlog requiring high communication overhead. In this paper we summarize a two-step prioritization approach using a decision theoretic model to prioritize system and software requirements that alleviates these concerns. The system is initially decomposed into high-level Minimal Marketable Features (MMFs) and each MMF is further decomposed into low-level requirements. The MMFs are prioritized against the business goals of the organization and the low-level requirements with respect to ease of realization and business value. The priorities of the individual requirements are influenced by that of the MMFs they belong to. This two-step approach serves as an important prelude for a dynamically prioritizable product backlog. In this paper we present a proof-of-concept of having implemented this approach with 24 real-client student project teams at the Software Engineering project course at the University of Southern California.

Article Free Access Share on Communication metrics for software development Authors: Bernd Bruegge School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PAView Profile , Allen H. Dutoit Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PAView Profile Authors Info & Claims ICSE '97: Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Software engineeringMay 1997 Pages 271–281https://doi.org/10.1145/253228.253286Published:01 May 1997Publication History 5citation1,155DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations5Total Downloads1,155Last 12 Months14Last 6 weeks3 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my Alerts New Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

In recent years, several Grand Challenges (GCs) of computing have been identified and expounded upon by various professional organizations in the U.S. and England. These GCs are typically very difficult problems that will take many hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of man-years to solve. Researchers involved in identifying these problems are not going to solve them. That task will fall to our students, and our students' students. Unfortunately for GC6, the Grand Challenge focusing on Dependable Systems Evolution, interest in formal methods--both by students and within computer science faculties - falls every year and any mention of mathematics in the classroom seems to frighten students away. So the question is: How do we attract new students in computing to the area of dependable software systems?

: Software maintenance is an important task in the software industry and thus an important part of the education of a software engineer. It has been neglected in education, partly because of the difficulty of preparing a software system upon which maintenance can be performed. This report provides an operational software system of 10,000 lines of Ada and several exercises based on that system. Concepts such as configuration management, regression testing, code reviews, and stepwise abstraction can be taught with these exercises.