Automating Software Engineering Best Practices Using an Open Source Continuous Integration Framework (Abstract Only)

Abstract

Ideally, software engineering courses should adequately reflect real-world software development so that students obtain a better understanding and experience with practices and techniques used in industry. Our objective is to improve software engineering courses by incorporating best practices for automated software engineering and facilitating rapid feedback for students using an open source continuous integration framework for evaluating student software development. The open source Jenkins Continuous Integration Server is the core of our framework, which provides a consistent environment for building student projects, executing automated test cases, calculating code coverage, executing static analysis, and generating reports for students. By using continuous integration, a common tool in real-world software development, we can incorporate software engineering best practices, introduce students to continuous integration in practice, and provide formative feedback to students throughout the software development lifecycle. We found that 76% or more of students in each of the classes that deploy our framework reported that using Jenkins increased their productivity, and that 84% or more of students in each of the classes reported that using Jenkins increased their code quality.