Abstract
The software industry is not satisfied with the preparation level of newly graduated professionals in Computing undergraduate courses. There is a predominance of traditional approaches to the Software Engineering (SE) teaching which proved to be inefficient, because they focus on the content from the professor´s viewpoint. This research aims to investigate if the use of student-focused approaches in the SE teaching can develop more technical competencies to apply in industry than when traditional approaches are applied. For this, an iterative model has been defined to integrate the main student-focused approaches and a controlled experiment was carried out in four undergraduate courses. The data were collected from structured interviews with students and analyzed using ANOVA. The results showed no significant statistical difference between student-focused and traditional teaching approaches in the development of SE competencies. However, these results were impacted by the motivation and commitment of the experiment students.
Highlights
Software Engineering (SE) can be defined as “the application of a systematic, disciplined, and quantifiable approach to the development, operation and maintenance of software” (IEEE Computer Society, 2014a)
The Computing undergraduate courses (e.g. Information Systems and Computer Science) try to prepare their students to work in the software industry (Subrahmanyam, 2009)
The results showed an increase of approximately 20 percent in student perception of learning about SE topics with the use of industry training strategies
Summary
Software Engineering (SE) can be defined as “the application of a systematic, disciplined, and quantifiable approach to the development, operation and maintenance of software” (IEEE Computer Society, 2014a). In this context, it is of paramount importance to train professionals of excellence in SE, so that they can develop high quality software. The industry has complained that such undergraduate courses do not teach students all the competencies they need to get their jobs done efficiently (Ng and Huang, 2013) In this way, software companies have to complement the knowledge of the new graduates with extra training in order to provide the other competencies related to the software engineering (Dagnino, 2014). This lack of training of the professionals may be the result of inadequate teaching in the University courses (Fox, 2015)
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