Software Engineering Capstone Research Articles

On the Impact of Grading on Teamwork Quality in a Software Engineering Capstone Course

Every semester, we deliver a capstone course on software engineering where students undertake a real-world project in three iterations. By the end of each iteration, students are graded in several dimensions: software quality, project management, and peer assessment. The latter is the only grade assigned individually; therefore, students who are penalized by their teams (e.g., for being perceived as low contributors to the team effort) are not severely affected. This results in little incentive for improvement, which potentially jeopardizes the overall quality of the project outcome. Envisaging to promote team cohesion, we devised a new grading rule: if the peer assessment of a student is lower than a threshold, that would be their final grade in the iteration. This paper reports the results of studying the effectiveness of the proposed rule. We recorded peer assessments over six consecutive semesters: (1) the first three as the baseline measure; (2) the semester where we introduced the new grading rule; and (3) the following two semesters, as a contrast. When the rule was first introduced, peer assessments resulted low and heavily spread at the beginning, but they consistently improved toward the end of the semester. When the instructional team already trusted the rule and explicitly emphasized its application, peer assessments consistently grew along the semester but resulted in fewer outliers. The study results show that exposing peer assessments earlier on helps promote team reflection. They also made evident the positive impact of teamwork for producing quality products in a software engineering capstone course.

Improving learning experiences in software engineering capstone courses using artificial intelligence virtual assistants

AbstractStudents of Software Engineering Capstone Courses face situations and challenges that grant them valuable experiences. However, as this knowledge is acquired through real‐life exposure, it is difficult to transmit it across different generations. To deal with this problem, it has been proposed that students record their learnings through a lesson learned model. But the question of how future students can best benefit from these records remains unanswered. This study addresses this problem through the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Virtual Assistant combined with a recommender system. Artificial Intelligence Virtual Assistants, as conversational chatbots, are a manifestation of AI via the simulation of conversation with human users. The technology has the potential to provide personalized service to a range of stakeholders. Thus, we seek to move this trend forward by now pushing these capabilities into the field of higher education. Consequently, we aim to assist software engineering students by leveraging collective knowledge to enhance learning experiences.

How to form a software engineering capstone team?

This research paper answers the question that how shall the students of software engineering undergraduate courses form teams for the capstone projects that can be cohesive too. In this research, 128 criteria for team formation are proposed for building teams for self-managing software engineering capstone projects. A comparison is also conducted to ascertain the level of cohesion among those teams that were formed using the proposed criteria and those that were not formed using the proposed criteria. The criteria were identified through a combination of qualitative questionnaire survey targeted at the graduated students of the past batches of Computer Science degree program and through synthesizing the literature on engineering capstone project teams identified under the guidance of KSAO framework for software engineering students. To check the effectiveness of the criteria, 100 students were asked to form the teams using the proposed criteria and other 100 students formed the teams without the proposed criteria. Those students that had used the proposed criteria for building teams and those that had formed teams without using the proposed criteria were asked to fill the modified Group Environment Questionnaire to ascertain the level of cohesion among the team members. The results were analyzed qualitatively and through descriptive quantification. The results show that the level of cohesion in teams that were formed using the proposed team building criteria was higher. There was a need for team building criteria in the literature on software engineering capstone project teams that conforms to a conceptual, theoretical framework; this gap is now filled through this research. This paper may also serve as a literature review paper for some readers.

Exploring motivation and teamwork in a large software engineering capstone course during the coronavirus pandemic

In the spring of 2020, the Department of Informatics covered a 20 ECTS capstone course in Software Engineering, mainly focusing on developing a complex application. The course used active learning methods, and 240 students were working in 42 cross-functional, agile teams. The pandemic caused by the coronavirus had a significant impact on the teaching given by the University of Oslo, as all physical education and collaboration among the teams had to be digital from March 12. At the end of the semester, we conducted a survey that focused on 1) aspects of teamwork (e.g., communication and coordination in the teams) and the relation to team performance (e.g., the application product) and 2) the students’ motivation and ability to cooperate through digital platforms. A total of 151 respondents in 41 agile student teams answered the survey. This study aimed to investigate how the teamwork and motivation of the students were affected by having to work virtually. The results are compared to results from the same course in 2019 and a similar survey on 71 professional teams published in 2016. Our results show that the teamwork was evaluated similarly to both the evaluation of survey conducted in 2019 and on the professional teams in 2016. The motivation among the students remained high, even though they had to collaborate virtually.

Understanding software developers' cognition in agile requirements engineering

During agile requirements engineering, developers need to assimilate and transform the original requirements information into system functions in the form of user stories. Obviously, this is a challenging cognition-based process, in which developers' cognition plays a key role. However, prior research has not explored developers' cognition during the process. The purpose of this study is to investigate and understand developers' cognitive representation styles and interaction patterns in agile requirements. A classification of developers' cognitive representation styles and interaction patterns was first proposed based on literature review. Then, an empirical research was conducted in a capstone software engineering course. Students were playing the role of developers and engaging in agile software development during this course, so their conversation about splitting and defining user stories was recorded and analyzed to examine developers' cognition via a content analysis method. The results show that, even when facing requirements analysis, developers tend to exhibit a technology-oriented cognitive representation style. Additionally, developers have more cognitive difficulty in determining activity and granularity than the role and business value of a user story. Developers also exhibit a preference for cognitive interaction pattern; assertion, comment, and two question-patterns are the major four patterns in our paper rather than information sharing, which was considered a major pattern in previous research. This paper contributes to our understanding of developers' cognition, further predicting and guiding developers' behaviors toward achieving good quality requirements analysis.

A Cloud-Based Mobile System to Improve Project Management Skills in Software Engineering Capstone Courses

Capstone project-based courses offer a favorable environment for the development of student skills through an approach incorporating theoretical and practical components. However, it is often difficult to successfully coordinate between students, stakeholders, and the academic team. The absence of suitable tools for addressing this issue, along with time constraints, often prevents students from attaining the expected course outcomes. This raises the question “How can we improve project management skills in computing majors through the use of technology-enhanced learning environments?” This paper presents a Cloud-based mobile system for supporting project management under a framework of best practices in software engineering capstone courses. The Kanban approach was used as a core of the proposed system. Kanban boards are very popular in the software industry today. It has been empirically shown that they provide increased motivation and project activity control due to their inherent simplicity. This helps the students and academic team be aware of the project context as it aids in preventing ambiguities, flaws, or uncertainties in the development of software artifacts.

문서 지향적 프로세스에서의 SCRUM 프로젝트 적용: 실험 사례연구

This paper examines how a Computer Engineering Graduate student team ran their Advanced Software Engineering Capstone project using SCRUM. The environment provided contextual challenges in terms of the on-site customer and upfront requirements document, not uncommon in a document driven single-step methodology. The paper details the methodology and practices used to run the project, and reflects on some of the challenges faced by the members of a typical software team when transitioning to a SCRUM process. The paper concludes by evaluating the success of the techniques and practices compared to the Agile Manifesto and Henrik Kniberg's Scrum checklist. The project was undertaken at South Korea's Ajou University.

INCORPORATING SOFTWARE MAINTENANCE IN A SENIOR CAPSTONE PROJECT

Software engineering capstone projects give students experience in developing a software product throughout the software life cycle. Projects such as these give students practical experience in applying concepts they have learned in their software engineering and computer science classes. This paper presents a software engineering capstone project conducted by students at the University of Virginia's College at Wise. The work of the students is documented in this paper. Unlike previous capstone projects conducted at this university, however, this one uses methods commonly found in agile development and is an adaptive maintenance development effort. To cite this document: Â Ira Weissberger, Abrar Qureshi, Assad Chowhan, Ethan Collins, and Dakota Gallimore , Incorporating software maintenance in a senior capstone project, International Journal of Cyber Society and Education, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 31-38, 2015. Permanent link to this document: http://dx.doi.org/10.7903/ijcse.1238

SimEx: Simulation Exercises on Humanitarian Crisis

A Software Engineering Capstone Service Learning project team at Fairfield University developed SimEx (Simulation Exercises on Humanitarian Crisis), a database driven web application for the JUHAN (Jesuits University Humanitarian Action Network) community to educate students on humanitarian actions and to enhance their knowledge on how to react at the time of a crisis. SimEx is accessible to anyone in the JUHAN community around the world and helps facilitate interaction among instructors, researchers, and student including sharing simulation exercise scenarios and providing students simulation exercises on humanitarian actions without any boundaries. SimEx also provides a discussion board to the JUHAN community to facilitate communication and idea sharing. SimEx was implemented in PHP with a MySQL database and several additional PHP plug-ins. In this paper, we describe the issues, process, and outcome of the collaborative service learning project between academia and community and discuss the future direction of SimEx.

Teaching agile methodology in a software engineering capstone course

Agile methodology as a relatively new approach to software engineering is becoming more popular in both industry and academia. Learning agile software development methodologies will unquestionably ...

Evaluating the Utility of Tablet PCs in a Software Engineering Capstone Course

The ECE Dept. at the University of Alberta uses Tablet PCs as a key resource in the Software Engineering capstone design course. We are currently developing a survey instrument (piloted in 2009) to measure the utility of these Tablets. The instrument is based on technology adoption theory, which posits that specific psychological states are antecedents to the usage of a new technology. We perform an exploratory factor analysis of the pilot survey, with an emphasis on our operationalization of the construct of Use of the Technology. However, small-sample-size effects prevent us from fully validating the model.

Crafting a software engineering capston project course

When properly constructed, a project-based capstone software engineering course can provide the challenging, but essential bridge from academic computing to the world of professional software development while fostering critical teamwork, leadership, and communications skills. In this work, we discuss experiences with five distinct student projects that involved heterogeneous teams, both systems and software engineering disciplines, industrial partnerships, component-based in addition to traditional development methodologies, and interactions with real customers. The heterogeneous teams included computer science, systems engineering, and systems engineering management majors and ranged in size from five to nine students. The projects included a protocol for file transfers between ground stations and on-orbit satellites, a satellite telemetry archiving and visualization tool, porting and extending an evolutionary algorithm for runway damage optimization, an unmanned aerial vehicle situational awareness capability, and a pedagogical interactive game for learning the concepts and applications of public key infrastructures. Partnership with an aerospace industry corporation exposed our students to Capability Maturity Model (CMM) Level 3 processes and facilitated enriching professional mentorships while stimulating student motivation and ownership of their efforts. The structure of the course afforded students significant autonomy to develop and explore both their interpersonal communication skills as well as the tenets of effective project management including scheduling, project tracking, and risk management. In addition, each project was specifically selected to offer the teams the opportunity to develop a useful deliverable with potential for use beyond this pedagogical setting. The result was a high-energy, dynamic, and demanding learning experience with plenty of lessons and opportunities for improvement by the instructor as well as the student.

A light-weight software engineering approach to developing small-scale information systems using .NET 2.0

Applied database management systems (DBMS) courses that require information systems projects present formidable challenges to both students and instructors. Students assume the twin responsibilities of (1) learning major theoretical concepts (e.g. the relational model, data modeling, database design, and standard structured query language (SQL)) while (2) mastering the syntax and semantics of a specific complex technology (e.g. MySQL, Oracle, MSSQL). Dealing with the project problem domain also adds to demands on student time and understanding. Consequently, instructors are increasingly challenged to organize course content, technology instruction, and project resources so that students can complete non-trivial course projects in a reasonable time frame. This tutorial will introduce a light-weight software engineering approach to guiding student project development in an introductory database management systems course. This iterative and incremental approach to database programming projects is predicated on the database application principle of firm separation of logic via the N-tier model and the software engineering tenet of well-specified requirements. Students enrolled in an introductory DBMS course follow this methodology to complete GUI client/server team projects. Database and software engineering skills and understanding developed in this course are then applied to more substantive 2- and 3-tier individual projects in an advanced DBMS course and team projects in a capstone software engineering course.

Software project demonstrations as not only an assessment tool but also a learning tool

Software project demonstrations are commonly used as an effective assessment tool in software courses. We found that in addition to helping instructors find out the status of student projects in a short period of time, project demonstrations motivate students and challenge them to synthesize, organize, prioritize, and articulate different aspects of their projects, all of which are important skills of professional software developers. Our experiment shows that project demonstrations are an effective learning tool as well. In this paper, we describe different types of project demonstrations in our experiment, including short, frequent five-minute demonstrations and formal final project demonstrations. This study was conducted in the context of a software engineering capstone project course.

Service based framework for knowledge portals

This paper describes our work on establishing an on-line learning community to facilitate the interactions of the student (teams) in their group projects. It is illustrated with a Portal in the capstone project of our Bachelor of Software Engineering (BSE) course. [2] reported on our Monash University Software Engineering (MUSE) Studio Lab and the innovative software engineering capstone project experience. Our student teams used to store the various artefacts, which were produced as part of the SE Studio (capstone) projects on the servers in the studio lab. However, these SE product and process artefacts were not accessible uniformly through a web browser in a MUSE Portal. The Portal environment is aimed at providing a virtual learning space, knowledge aggregation and user management. In this paper, we provide details of our pedagogical service based framework, which has been designed and built to provide features to Portal users. The framework supports services such as group/team collaboration, task tracking, and project planning.The collaboration and learning services available from our Knowledge Portal is based on the learning activities as defined by [1] Nonaka1994. Nonaka defines: socializing to exchange views and develop trust between team members, dialoguing to share mental models and develop common vocabulary, systemising to combine knowledge by visualising interactions and constructing artifacts and exercising to communicate and reflect on outcomes. We follow a similar approach to enable team members to discuss and reflect on group findings with respect to SE processes & products during the year long SE Studio project, and reflect over individual thesis components.A pedagogical service based framework can service the current pedagogical needs of the SE group projects, other related subjects, and SE Honours research projects and is also extendible with more services on a demand basis. The focus has been on allowing custom subject specific services to be created without having the inherent overheads.A pedagogical framework with service based architecture has been built to provide services to the Portal users. The Portal Environment is the front-end through which services are exposed. Examples of services are: task tracking and project planning in group projects; collaboration between team members in a group project in a subject unit; knowledge repository of product/project assets; calendar facility etc. Support infrastructure services of user authentication, role and service allocation etc. are also managed via the portal environment.We show how on-line learning communities can be supported using the MUSE knowledge portal. The framework supports services such as team collaboration, task tracking, and project planning. The url for MUSE Portal is http://museportal.csse.monash.edu.au:8080/MUSEPortalWeb/.

Performance lies my professor told me

In this paper we report a survey examining the approach to performance and software engineering in courses at highly ranked computer science schools in the United States. An analysis of the survey shows serious shortcomings including inadequate or missing definitions of performance, reactive "fix it later" mentality, vague performance requirements, and a general lack of awareness of the practices developed by the Software Performance Engineering (SPE) community. The survey is followed by guidelines for teaching SPE to undergraduates based on a semester long course we have developed. It is our plan to incorporate these guidelines into the curriculum of our senior capstone software engineering course.

MUSE studio lab and innovative software engineering capstone project experience

This paper presents our rationale in setting up an innovative studio lab called the MUSE (Monash University Software Engineering) Studio Lab for our final year undergraduate Software Engineering students in 2002, an evaluation of the outcomes for 2002 and plans for 2003 and beyond. We describe the Monash University Software Engineering (MUSE) Strategy to make the MUSE culture and MUSE agile process branding visible through the MUSE Studio Lab for the learners, academics, management and the outside world of academia and industry. This strategy is aimed at supporting a continuum of learning styles in three units in the final year of our Bachelor of Software Engineering Program. The teaching/learning model used is a predominantly constructivist/student-centered/active learning approach for the Capstone SE project (Studio unit), and a constructivist approach for the Honours Research thesis unit. A more traditional teaching approach is used for the Systems Validation, Verification, Quality & Standards unit based on traditional instructional design model which is objectivist in view of learning. We also provide details of the the middle weight process that student groups follow in their full year SE Capstone project. At MUSE Studio, we have fused pedagogy with technology.

Experiences in threading uml throughout a computer science program

The Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of the United States Military Academy at West Point, NY, decided to standardize its computer science program on the unified modeling language (UML) for all software design representations. Converting the appropriate courses to support formal teaching or reinforcement of UML concepts was planned as a phased approach over four academic years. Formal UML instruction was planned for Computer Science 1 courses and the senior two-course software engineering capstone sequence. Reinforcement of UML would be in the intervening courses. Once implementation began, it became apparent that a prolonged period between formal blocks of instruction was insufficient. Instead, some additional courses were redesigned to support formal UML instruction. The end result was a richer and deeper exposure to UML than anticipated over the same timeframe.

The software engineering capstone

One of the largest challenges facing educators teaching undergraduate software engineering courses is providing the students with meaningful experiences they will find useful when they complete their undergraduate education. Those experiences should include all phases of the software development process, and to be as realistic as possible they should also include the uncertainty and continual change present in any real project. In addition, those experiences need to include working with others in a team, which can affect the morale of some students and also poses challenges to the professor when the time to assign grades arrives. In this paper we discuss how we have tailored the software engineering capstone sequence at the U.S. Air Force Academy to address these issues.

Integrating recent research results into undergraduate curricula (panel)

On July 7-11, 60 computer scientists came together at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington to consider how the undergraduate curricula might be improved in light of recent research in computer science. At this NSF-funded workshop, researchers presented work in four areas where current research might be particularly relevant, and undergraduate faculty (with experience in software engineering, functional programming, artificial intelligence, discrete mathematics or theoretical computer science) explored the current state of undergraduate computer science curricula and ways in which they might be better informed by recent research.Each participant attended sessions in one of the four interest areas--Software Engineering Capstone Courses, Functional Programming, Neural Networks and Their Applications, and Computational Geometry--and faculty developed curricular materials that they could use in their teaching the following year. Those materials are being placed on the WWW, and faculty are refining them as they use them in their courses. A second workshop is planned for summer, 1998.The workshop was sponsored by The Evergreen State College, the Oregon Graduate Institute, the Washington Center for the Improvement of Undergraduate Education, and by the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS).All of the panelists participated in the workshop and each panel member will share his or her experiences in incorporating the recent research results studied at the workshop into their undergraduate curriculum. In addition, the panelists will discuss with the audience their own plans for integrating research results into their own undergraduate programs.