Implementing large projects in software engineering courses

The typical one-semester software engineering course is normally geared towards new software development. Unfortunately, most new computer science graduates do not find themselves in a position where they are developing new software but instead in a position where they are maintaining an existing product. This paper describes some current practical software maintenance approaches which can be taught as a part of a software engineering course.

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.

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 instructors generally utilize conventional methods in teaching software engineering courses, where the students are provided theoretical knowledge based on text books or lecture notes. Usage of collaborative tools may be a solution to the problems of not practicing the depth of the components of the subject. This study proposes the usage of a collaborative tool, namely, Google Docs in a software engineering course based on predefined scenarios. The review meeting subject was selected for this purpose and students’ reactions were assessed with a survey after the completion of the experiments. The survey data were analysed using least square regression method. The results have shown that efficiency, certainty, satisfaction, advantage, complexity, learnability, and intention are indicators of the adoption of the online collaborative tool.

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.

Software development is a fast-changing area. New methods and new technologies emerge all the time. As a result, the education of software engineering is generally considered not to be keeping pace with the development of software engineering in industry. Given the limited resources in academia, it is unrealistic to purchase all the latest software tools for classroom usage. In this chapter, the authors describe how free/open-source data and free/open-source tools are used in an upper-level software engineering class at Indiana University South Bend. Depending on different learning objectives, different free/open-source tools and free/open-source data are incorporated into different team projects. The approach has been applied for two semesters, where instructor’s experiences are assembled and analyzed. The study suggests (1) incorporating both free/open-source tools and free/open-source data in a software engineering course so that students can better understand both development methods and development processes and (2) updating software engineering course regularly in order to keep up with the advance of development tools and development methods in industry.

This paper presents an approach to teaching a Software Engineering course, as well as significant feedback from the students who were enrolled in the first offering of the course using this approach. The course provided students with conceptual material as well as experience with a large project. Just teaching concepts or major topics, while important, is not sufficient; students need hands-on exposure to doing a large project in order to comprehend the complexity of building real systems. On the other hand a course cannot "teach" only a project because students need a conceptual framework, approaches, and techniques upon which to base the complexities of software engineering. The feedback from the students who took the first offering of the course provides useful information to anyone who teaches Software Engineering, in addition to instructors preparing to teach the subject for the first time.

In teaching software engineering, it is a major challenge to integrate applied methodology and theory into the practice of software development. Today teaching a course in software engineering involves a theoretical approach with white board and doing a project at the end of the course. Teaching Software engineering as a course involves many disciplines and requires delivering lectures accompanied by lecture demos and hands on lab sessions to accompany individual constituent topics or areas that form the bricks and mortar of this course. Only when the bricks and mortar of software engineering have delivered a solid foundation, is it then the software engineering as a course will be delivered in a true and meaningful sense. This paper presents a method to teach Software Engineering using the applied approach that the author designed and successfully used.

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.

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.

Many studies have reported the utilization of Problem-Based Learning (PBL) in teaching Software Engineering courses. However, these studies have different views of the effectiveness of PBL. This paper presents the design of an Advanced Software Engineering course for undergraduate Software Engineering students that uses PBL to teach them Agile software development methods- particularly Scrum. The course also aims to develop entrepreneurial skills needed for software engineering graduates to better prepare them for the software industry. The assessment process designed for this course is illustrated. The paper shows that Scrum practices correlate with the characteristics of the PBL approach, which has resulted in a successful experience of PBL as reported by students in an end of a semester survey.

When teaching software engineering courses it is highly important to have good text books that are well-founded, up-to-date, and easily accessible to students. However, currently available text books on the market are either very broad or highly specialized, making it hard to select appropriate books for specific software engineering courses. Moreover, due to the rapidly changing subject of software engineering, books tend to become obsolete, which make students hesitate to buy books even if they are part of the listed course literature. In this paper, we briefly explain and discuss an approach of using a web-based system for creating collaborative and peer-reviewed text books that can be customized individually for specific courses. We describe and discuss the proposed system from a use case perspective.

In the past there has been much written about successful commercial software development projects while failures are largely ignored. Similarly, the software engineering education literature contains many references to successful course projects, while academic course project failures are rarely described. This paper provides an analysis of software engineering course project failures as well as practical recommendations for increasing the chances of successful projects. The failures are grouped into technical, personal and management categories. Our recommendations are based upon a synthesis of current approaches being adopted to various degrees in industry as well as our own personal experiences. Most of our non-technical recommendations have historically received very little attention in course offerings or even current popular software engineering texts. It is our goal in this paper to sensitize software engineering course instructors to the possible failures their project teams face as well as provide them with insight into increasing their teams chances for success.

Software engineering course is one of the core courses of computer science. The students trained in the current teaching mode can no longer meet the market demand for high-technology talents. Based on this, the research attempts to optimize the traditional software engineering teaching mode by using the project teaching method (PTM). According to the basic concept of PTM and course characteristics, the reform path of PTM in software engineering course is explored in the experiment. Then in the experiment, the indicators that affect teaching reform effect is selected and a evaluation model is built. And GA-BP algorithm is used to evaluate the effect of the evaluation model. To verify the performance of the built model and the final evaluation effect, the research results are tested from the fitness of the algorithm, error performance, prediction in the data set and other aspects. GA-BP algorithm converged when it iterated to the 18th generation, and the final fitness value was 0.61. The average error square value of GA-BP was 0.35 and the minimum error square sum of GA-BP was 0.48. Its prediction accuracy in test set and training set was 93.4% and 94.1% respectively. The maximum prediction error in the training sample was only 0.015, and the performance of the above data was better than the other three algorithms. To sum up, applying PTM to software engineering curriculum reform can achieve better teaching results.

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