Towards contextualised software engineering education

Learning Software Engineering principles, processes, methods and tools is a prerequisite to becoming a Software Engineer. The technological advancements and revolution in this new century are probing the boundaries of education and training in software engineering. This work tries to locate the shortcomings in existing approaches to Education in Software Engineering (ESE) in respect to today's technological advancements. We hereby proposed a new model for Education in Software Engineering to bridge the industry-academia gap.

The course on Software Engineering is important for both the undergraduate and postgraduate programmes of computer science. This is particularly so in terms of making the students industry ready by exposing them to the processes and practices of life cycle activities of software development. The traditional approach to teaching the course on Software Engineering has not been able to make a positive impact on learning because: the course instructors mostly lack exposure to industry practices, the course material being referred while teaching the course fails to establish the context as the case studies referred are alien to the students and assessment focusing mainly on memory oriented questions. Thus teaching the course on Software Engineering has got reduced to monotonous lecturing, in the absence of experience and case studies. An attempt to address the issues referred above is made by the authors. The theory course on Software Engineering was redesigned by tightly coupling a Mini project course with it. Different activities are designed along with Class room teaching to make Software Engineering as joyful course for the students. The proposed methodology helped the students to improve their Software Engineering concepts and quality of capstone projects. The paper discusses the approach followed, the results obtained and the experience gained.

Based on Software Engineering discipline, unit testing play significant rule in testing procedure to determine if the source code fit for use. A unit test is the smallest testable part of an application. In basic learning of unit testing, JUnit framework with interactive GUI techniques as suitable tools in supporting students learning in higher learning institutes. In this paper, it presents the method to create unit testing code and how JUnit can give good experience in unit testing learning in software engineering. The result shows by using JUnit framework in unit testing learning can improve student interest and understanding in software engineering courses.

Context: Capture-recapture method has long been adopted in software engineering as a relatively objective way for defect estimation. While many relevant studies have been carried out to evaluate various capture-recapture models and estimators, there still lacks common understanding on the adoption status of the method in software engineering. It is necessary to systematically collect empirical evidence of Capture-recapture adoption hence form necessary understanding on the method.Objective: This study aims to synthesize relevant primary studies on the adoption of capture-recapture method in software engineering, and try to identify possible gaps between the state-of-practice and the state-of-art so as to provide clues for future research.Method: By following the guidelines of Kitchenham, we conducted a Systematic Literature Review(SLR) on studies of the adoption of capture-recapture method in software engineering.Results: From 5 common digital libraries, we retrieved 506 published articles, among them 44 were identified as relevant primary studies. We identified 18 capture-recapture estimators under 4 basic models. Types of the currently existing studies as well as the relevant influencing factors to adoption of the capture-recapture method are also discussed.Conclusion: Results show that there are no conclusive decisions on the best capture-recapture models and estimators. Besides, the number of inspectors and their capability to detect defects as well as the difficulty to detect defects are most critical influencing factors. In addition, lacking of industrial application may be the major issue of current adoption status of capture-recapture method in software engineering.

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.

Gamification has proven to be an adequate approach in various educational environments, from kindergarten and elementary school to higher education classrooms. While it has been extremely effective with school students and standard subjects, such as STEM, when applied correctly, gamification and game-based learning can be applied with older students, even in the information technology and software engineering field. The paper outlines the results based on the experience of applying gamification of education to attract and stimulate student motivation and engagement in class. An approach for including games to teach software engineering methods and concepts is described. Different styles of software engineering games are examined and several of the most appropriate and relevant to the students’ field of study are integrated in the Software engineering course. Descriptions of the games and the planned student progression through them are presented. A collaborative agile team-based approach is implemented and described. A suitable number of student groups have been selected, and the results from surveys held among those students are shown. Conclusions about the improvement of the process are discussed.

As a basis subject of computer, Computer software engineering has been increasingly used in various fields, Games management system has been pre-designed on the basis of application of software engineering theory and method. The actual games management system software has been developed from using software engineering methods, in the actual design and development, it has been proved that a practical system has been perfect created with efficiency design, fully functional form, rational and affordable design.

The discipline of software engineering is developing rapidly. Its practitioners must deal with an evolving collection of problems and with new technologies for dealing with those problems. Software engineering education must anticipate new problems and technologies, providing education in the enduring principles of the field in the context of the best current practice. Since changes in the discipline cannot be completely anticipated, software engineers must be able to assume responsibility for their own continuing professional development. This paper describes significant changes now taking place in the field of software engineering and proposes some goals and objectives for the professional education of software engineers.

Software engineering education is challenged by the need to convey practical experience in the context of a rich and large body of theoretical knowledge. This study investigates whether the use of open source projects can reduce the gap between theory and practice in undergraduate software engineering courses. Two qualitative case studies were conducted with students performing activities in an open source project, each one in a different course: software testing and software requirements. Results point out that the use of open source projects provides a concrete experience similar to industry experience, allows high cognitive engagement when performing tasks, favors understanding and content retention, and leads to the recognition of the usefulness of software engineering principles, techniques and methods.

Traditional, informal techniques in software engineering reach their limits when complex systems are to be developed efficiently. The Institute for Formal Methods in Computer Science of the Universitat Stuttgart states: Tools like IDEs, automatic code generation from graphical descriptions, visualization techniques like UML diagrams, and others are certainly necessary. However, they often lack the ability to support detailed and provably sound reasoning about complex systems. Formal methods in software engineering provide approaches to close that gap.

In general, decomposition methods can facilitate the process of solving sophisticated and heterogonous problems in the area of software development and engineering. These approaches are assisting to decompose problems based on different disciplines, characteristics and functionalities that is results into increasing the computational efficiency (e.g. parallel processing/computing) and accelerate the software changing process, software modifications and error tracking. Essentially, these approaches contribute to the degree of modularity to decompose a complex problem into different sub-problems and to focus on local objectives. There are different approaches that are used to decompose a problem into the smaller ones by keeping/improving the accuracy and efficiency in software engineering. Three major decomposition approaches that have been used in software engineering are decomposition based on aspects, objects and views. Each of these has their own characteristics and limitation. This research paper aims to address some of these important issues regarding to the decomposition approaches that are used in the software engineering discipline. In the next step, a new decomposition paradigm called multi-level decomposition will be introduced and a proper vision in terms of the key characteristics, differences and analogies between this decomposition method and others will be addressed. At the end, an example problem will be decomposed based upon the presented approach to show the potential capability of the approach.

Indian software industry has set up huge growth targets for future. These targets would be heavily affected by the software engineering (SE) education scenario in the country. The purpose of this paper is to provide a holistic understanding of SE education issues and challenges specific to Indian context, from both industry and academic perspective. This study is based on our (a) interaction with industry through SE education related projects, surveys and discussions. (B) Observations as an integral part of Indian SE educators' community. There is an urgent need for addressing these deep rooted issues, as the lack of proper SE education may be the single largest factor that may negatively affect the industry. Understanding these issues will help to identify the action items that initiate software engineering educational reforms in the country. We also discuss the essential and minimal set of SE knowledge, skills and dispositions that the Indian industry expects from engineers who will be joining the industry. Indian software industry is a global leader in software application development and maintenance services, but there very few studies on the issues and effects associated with SE education in the Indian context. Though this discussion is limited to India, but we believe that it represents the existing conditions in many developing countries where IT and ITES (IT enabled services) industry is gaining importance.

This paper proposes a framework to support the development and use of tools that support the teaching of software and Web engineering. It describes the evolution of tools to support the teaching of software engineering from simple client-side tools that support drawing DFDs and UML diagrams to Web-based repositories that support process modelling. The paper specifically introduces the concept of and describes their use within the WWW. It also describes tools that automatically create automated walkthroughs for the World Wide Web (WWW) and their evaluation within a masters-level software engineering module. Conclusions are drawn about the general applicability of the framework and proposals are made for further work in this area.

Within the last few years constructivism has attracted both computer science and software engineer educators, because of its potential for improving academic learning. Currently, however, the application of constructivism is limited to examples in specific contexts so that it is difficult to transfer them to other institutions or even other courses. To apply effectively constructivism to software engineering and computer science education, instructors need a generic pedagogical model for translating constructivist principles into practice. This paper reports on the application of a pedagogical model for translating constructivism into a Web-based course in object-oriented software engineering.

Empirical research is playing a significant role in software engineering (SE), and it has been applied to evaluate software artifacts and technologies. There have been a great number of empirical research articles published recently. There is also a large research community in empirical software engineering (ESE). In this paper, we identify both the overall landscape and detailed implementations of ESE, and investigate frequently applied empirical methods, targeted research purposes, used data sources, and applied data processing approaches and tools in ESE. The aim is to identify new trends and obtain interesting observations of empirical software engineering across different sub-fields of software engineering. We conduct a mapping study on 538 selected articles from January 2013 to November 2017, with four research questions. We observe that the trend of applying empirical methods in software engineering is continuously increasing and the most commonly applied methods are experiment, case study and survey. Moreover, open source projects are the most frequently used data sources. We also observe that most of researchers have paid attention to the validity and the possibility to replicate their studies. These observations are carefully analyzed and presented as carefully designed diagrams. We also reveal shortcomings and demanded knowledge/strategies in ESE and propose recommendations for researchers.