A report on software engineering education workshop

Abstract

In this report, we present a summary and a few reflections of a one day workshop on Software Engineering Education held on February 22, 2012 at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India collocated with the 5th India Software Engineering Conference. We identify a gap and believe there is a need for creating an annual discussion forum that serves the need of having a regular workshop for software engineering education in India and also benefit the global software engineering education community by sharing the workshop insights and results by a publication process. The workshop consists of two keynotes, one from academia and one from industry, two subgroups discussions and presentations by the subgroups on their discussions. Three systematic techniques, invitation of position statements, set up of a Google group and an online survey, were employed before the workshop to estimate number of participants, subgroups and size of each subgroup for effective discussions. Twenty participants attended the workshop. The keynotes were on Using Collaborative Learning and Divergent Thinking to Teach Software Engineering and on Software Engineering Competency Development Model. Three topics were selected for subgroups discussions by the participants: use of various methods, such as learning while playing and project-based software engineering, over Power Point lecture, requirements and needs of undergraduate software engineering degree program from the perspective of Indian software industry and curriculum content, coverage, and impact of software engineering courses. The workshop was a successful endeavor and the response in terms of the contributions by participants is a clear indicator and confirmation of the need of having a focused discussion forum for brainstorming on software engineering education in India