Experience Report on a Move to Techniques-Oriented Student Project Grading

A learning management system is a system that supports student learning with several components. Telkom University is an institution that has an LMS called CeLOE LMS (Center for e-Learning and Open Education Learning Management System). Using LMS supports students' learning process, and lecturers can monitor what activities are carried out by their students. The pattern of learning by students can affect the success of learning in certain situations. The influence of these learning patterns makes lecturers need to pay attention to differences in student learning patterns. The data that will be used in this research are Website Application Development and Enterprise Systems courses. This study uses a process mining method with fuzzy miner algorithms to overcome the "spaghetti-like" process model into a more straightforward and easier-to-understand form. The resulting process model will then be analyzed using the graph simplification process method to obtain an accurate process model that describes the event log. In the Website Application Development course, conformance for all students Event logs is 99.93%, while conformance for students with index A event log is 99.94%. In the Enterprise System course, both event logs show the best conformance of 100%. The modeling produced by the two courses shows that the resulting model has a close alignment between the fuzzy model and the event log to reflect the behavior observed in the event log.

As software becomes more ubiquitous and complex, the cost of software bugs continues to grow at a staggering rate. To remedy this situation, there needs to be major improvement in the knowledge and application of software validation techniques. Although there are several software validation techniques, software testing continues to be one of the most widely used in industry. The high demand for software engineers in the next decade has resulted in more software engineering (SE) courses being offered in academic institutions. However, due to the number of topics to be covered in SE courses, little or no attention is given to software testing, resulting in students entering industry with little or no testing experience. We propose a minimally disruptive approach of integrating software testing into SE courses by providing students access to a collaborative learning environment containing learning materials on testing techniques and testing tools. In this article, we describe the learning environment and the studies conducted to measure the benefits accrued by students using the learning environment in the SE courses.

Over a decade ago, the manufacturing industry determined it needed to be more agile to thrive and prosper in a changing, nonlinear, uncertain and unpredictable business environment The software engineering community has come to the same realization. A group of software methodologists has created a set of software development processes, termed agile methodologies that have been specifically designed to respond to the demands of the turbulent software industry. Each of the processes in the set of agile processes comprises a set of practices. As educators, we must assess the emerging agile practices, integrate them into our courses (carefully), and share our experiences and results from doing so. The paper discusses the use of extreme programming, a popular agile methodology, in a senior software engineering course at North Carolina State University. It then provides recommendations for integrating agile principles into a core software engineering course.

Service learning aims to expose students mainly at tertiary studies to engage with the local communities under the selected registered courses. It enables students to apply the assigned projects at the chosen community. Thus, they can learn and solve real problems. This paper reports the service-learning component that is integrated with a four-credit Application Development course for the third-year students of Semester 1, Session 2019/2020 under Bachelor of Computer Science (Software Engineering) programme at School of Computing, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. The students were attached to a rural community project known as Centre for Advancement in Rural Education Informatics (iCARE) during the one-semester study. The students were assigned to solve the issues in mastering English among rural learners by developing either a mobile application or an augmented reality application in a team of three students. The materials were provided by the English teacher who acts as the key stakeholder to represent the rural schools in Southeast Johor region under the Southeast Johor Development Authority (KEJORA). The study shows good impacts among both the university students and the rural students selected under the study.

In this paper we describe our initiative to incorporate research, professional practice and methodologies into two undergraduate software engineering courses. As part of the Undergraduate Research Experience (URE) initiative on our campus, we modified two of our core software engineering courses. In our Software Development II (junior level) and Software Development Project (senior level) courses we integrated research projects, corporate visits and research talks to develop a deeper understanding of software engineering research and practice amongst our students.

In software engineering education, large projects are widely recognized as a useful way of exposing students to the real-world difficulties of team software development. But large projects are difficult to put into practice. First, educators rarely have additional time to manage software projects. Second, classrooms have inherent limitations that threaten the realism of large projects. Third, quantitative evaluation of individuals who work in groups is notoriously difficult. As a result, many software engineering courses compromise the project experience by reducing the team sizes, project scope, and risk. In this paper, we present an approach to teaching a one-semester software engineering course in which 20 to 30 students work together to construct a moderately sized (15 KLOC) software system. The approach combines carefully coordinated lectures and homeworks, a hierarchical project management structure, modern communication technologies, and a web-based project tracking and individual assessment system. Our approach provides a more realistic project experience for the students, without incurring significant additional overhead for the instructor. We present our experiences using the approach the last 2 years for the software engineering course at The College of William and Mary. Although the approach has some weaknesses, we believe that they are strongly outweighed by the pedagogical benefits.

The evaluation of an advanced software engineering (SE) course is a challenging task that should be addressed as part of the course design. In this paper, we describe an implementation of the reflective practitioner perspective as part of an advanced SE course and introduce its use for feedback purposes. Reflective feedback goes beyond merely using feedback questionnaires. Furthermore, we show, using both qualitative and quantitative empirical data, that the course on which the perspective was applied meets its objectives and fosters students' awareness to the multidimensional nature of SE.

One of the main concerns in the software industry continues to be the development of high quality software. This concern will be exacerbated as software systems become more complex. The training of software developers continues to grow in academia since more institutions are offering software engineering (SE) courses. However, the list of topics that are expected to be covered in this course leaves little or no time for topics that focus on developing quality software, such as software testing and the use of testing tools.In this paper we describe an approach that non-intrusively integrates the use of software testing tools in SE courses. The cornerstone of our approach is the interaction students have with a Web-Based Repository of Software Testing Tools (WReSTT) that contains tutorials on testing concepts and testing tools. WReSTT employs both collaborative learning and social networking features that are attractive to students. We present the results of preliminary study performed in two SE courses that show how using the resources in WReSTT can potentially impact the students' understanding of software testing and the use of testing tools.

The Covid-19 pandemic forced many academic institutions around the world to switch to online teaching. This shift occurred suddenly and with little preparation and this method of instruction was named “emergency remote teaching”. This paper will describe the effects of emergency remote teaching on teaching a software engineering course at a Japanese university, showing how the online environment was used as an alternative to cancelling classes. Strategies for implementing active learning and for engaging students during this software engineering course will be highlighted. Based on the results and observations gathered during the teaching of this course, important conclusions will be drawn. They will constitute a starting point for planning and implementing future software engineering courses and for making sure that active learning continues to remain an essential part of the instruction process.KeywordsEmergency remote teachingActive learningSoftware engineering

The goals of computer science department and software engineering courses are not always clear as they could be, and exactly how much of a computer science curriculum should be spent on software engineering topics at the expense of topics with more immediate relevance to computer science majors is far from clear. Computer science students are sometimes skeptical about the relevance of software engineering course topics, particularly those who have had some experience in industry. They report that the techniques and procedures covered in standard software engineering texts are seldom used in industry. There is not enough communication between Industry and Academia, and graduates often must be re-trained for their new jobs. This is a proposal for a modification in the approach to software engineering education for computer science majors, and for clarification of the goals of computer science programs, and calls for procedures to increase the relevancy of computer science and software engineering courses to meet the needs of industry.

The primary goal of an introductory software engineering course is to provide a complete introduction to software engineering. Typically this includes concepts, terms, processes, tools, and history. However, for students to fully understand software engineering and be prepared for software development careers, courses must also consider the sociological and communication aspects, often called the socio-technical aspects. Unfortunately, these aspects are difficult to teach and do not receive much coverage in the most widely used software engineering textbooks. Faculty have used various approaches to address the socio-technical aspects. One popular method is to use role-playing exercises. The software engineering education literature contains many papers advocating role-play. However, these papers describe role-play integrated in semester-long projects and often provide little detail about the exercises. Using these published approaches in an existing software engineering course requires significant work by the instructor. This paper presents a set of ready to use role-play exercises that can be downloaded and easily integrated into an existing course. Student reaction is also reported.

Working in a team for a limited period of time and to deliver a high quality product are some of the skills students should gain during their studies at the university. Therefore universities should offer software engineering courses teaching agile methodologies broadly used in the industry as well. These courses need to simulate a real world working environment introducing agile methods like XP or Scrum. We present the design of our Scrum based undergraduate course Software Engineering 1, provide in-depth information about important course details and also give recommendations for tools we find useful. Unlike other software engineering courses we have a large staff of up to 11 supervisors allowing us to simulate close to real world working conditions. We provide every team with a tutor who is responsible for observing his team and answer questions. Additional research assistants are playing the role of customers.

Over time much has been written on how to organize a course on software engineering, with arguments flowing for and against additional complexity. It is highly believe that SWE is an umbrella course in computing and most dangerously in any course proclaimed to be specialist in generating Software Engineers. Unfortunately, this may still not be widely recognized, both in the industry and in academia. The modern course on SWE requires that the student is familiar not just with many aspects of computing such as programming languages but rather with many other aspects including networking, Internet technologies, programming languages, databases, Human Computer Interaction (HCI), computer graphics, and project management. Depending on the year of academic study these expectations could be unrealistic, especially if that is a 2nd year course. Based on the above view, it is essential to investigate what are the necessary attributes of an ideal Software Engineering at the undergraduate level and how much it is covering of the requirements imposed by the business and industry market. This paper will investigate how appropriate are Software Engineering courses at the undergraduate level in terms of the areas of concentration, delivery approach, and the real life practical training received by the target group of students. It will deeply investigate the overall intended learning objectives and how they are related to the choice of modules offered. On the other hand, a number of business institutions will be surveyed for achieving an overview of how effective graduates of Software engineering courses are within these selected institutions and most importantly what are the challenges they encounter in professional life given their level of university education i.e. how helpful their undergraduate education has been helpful to their development as specialists.

In view of the demand for software professionals in current software industry and the teaching situation in universities, the necessity of researching and constructing software engineering course group is proposed; the basic principles of constructing software engineering course group is discussed, the knowledge system of software engineering courses group is analyzed, a three-segment two-lay course group is designed, the integration and division of the course contents is achieved, and the revision and recombination is promoted, the foundation is laided, in order to further improve the qua lit y o f personnel training and construction level of course group, and accomplish the scale effect of curriculum group construction.

GitHub, a widely used software development platform, facilitates organization of projects and collaboration. Its popularity extends to students who use it to host code and create open repositories for class projects. However, despite its potential benefits, the use of GitHub in education has often been unplanned and lacked structure. Consequently, the effectiveness of GitHub in improving student learning and project development skills remains unclear. This study explores the impact of using GitHub as a tool in a software engineering course on students' skill sets and perspectives. We present the results of an experiment conducted with 319 undergraduate students to assess whether using GitHub improves their engagement in teamwork and subsequently enhances learning. The study conducted pre‐ and postsurveys to capture students' perspectives and experiences. Additionally, we analyzed the number of commits, pull requests (PRs), and issues from group repositories to assess learning outcomes. Our findings revealed that most students had limited knowledge of collaborative development and teamwork before using GitHub in the course. However, after using GitHub, they demonstrated effective use of teamwork skills and collaborative development, resulting in significant improvements in their overall learning.