Software Engineering Education Research Articles

Aligning Software Engineering Teaching Strategies and Practices with Industrial Needs

Several approaches have been proposed to reduce the gap between software engineering education and the needs and practices of the software industry. Many of them aim to promote a more active learning attitude in students and provide them with more realistic experiences, thus recreating industry software development environments and collaborative development and, in some cases, with the involvement of companies mainly acting as potential customers. Since many degree courses typically offer separate subjects to teach requirements engineering, analysis and design, coding, or validation, the integration of all these phases normally necessitates experience in a project context and is usually carried out in a final year project. The approach described in this article benefits from the close involvement of a software house company which goes beyond the common involvement of a potential customer. Students are integrated into distributed teams comprising students, teachers and IT professionals. Teams follow the agile Scrum methodology and use the OutSystems low-code development platform providing students with the experience of an almost real scenario. The results show that this approach complements the knowledge and practice acquired in course subjects, develops the students’ technical and non-technical skills, such as commitment, teamwork, and communication, and initiates them in the methodologies and development strategies used in these companies. The feedback from the teachers involved, software companies and students was very positive.

Software Engineering Education: Discovering Future Skills

In the contemporary digital age the majority of industries become very much software dependent, require automation, digitization, and deployment of new technologies. The need for specialists, skilled in software engineering, is in high demand. In this study, we set out to investigate what challenges may arise in IT students skill sets and new competences in the software engineering context and answer the question how is skills demand evolving and where the gaps will be?". The paper analyzes what specific knowledge needs to be developed during university education and identifies their evolving skills demand. The paper recommends how students and young specialists in software engineering need to change themselves to adapt to the changing world.

Understanding general concepts of requirements engineering through design thinking: An experimental study with students

AbstractTeaching requirements engineering (RE) is one of the challenging parts of any software engineering (SE) education curriculum because it deals with understanding the problem from multiple perspectives and acquiring a holistic view of the system. Academicians have adopted several innovative approaches to teaching RE concepts to students, and design thinking (DT) is one of them. DT integrates the needs of people, technology, and requirements and can help learn and apply human‐centered techniques to solve problems. An experimental study is conducted with 315 undergraduate students to realize how they can learn the RE process effectively by combining DT methods with the RE concepts for an effective RE education. This study intends to identify how this integration help students in using multiple elicitation methods, better visualization and understanding of the system requirements, and achieving various teaching objectives. An experimental study was planned and executed with students by integrating DT methods for RE activities from the beginning of problem definition to the final solution. The evaluation was done by collecting students' responses to pre‐survey and post‐survey questions capturing the students' perspectives on the RE and DT techniques. The students' responses suggested that the DT drive RE activities to improve their learning, thinking abilities, engagement with the team, and teamwork. Additionally, the students' artifacts during the DT process have also been evaluated. The use of DT methods helped in understanding the elicitation process and, consequently, helped reach the solution.

Integrating SPOCs in Software Testing Education: Evidence in Emergency Remote Courses

Nowadays, SPOCs (Small Private Online Courses) have been used as complementary methods to support classroom teaching. SPOCs are courses that apply the usage of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), combining classroom with online education, making them an exciting alternative for contexts such as emergency remote teaching. Although SPOCs have been continuously proposed in the software engineering teaching area, it is crucial to assess their practical applicability via measuring the effectiveness of this resource in the teaching-learning process. In this context, this paper aims to present an experimental evaluation to investigate the applicability of a SPOC in a Verification, Validation, and Software Testing course taught during the period of emergency remote education during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil. Therefore, we conducted a controlled experiment comparing alternative teaching through the application of a SPOC with teaching carried out via lectures. The comparison between the teaching methods is made by analyzing the students’ performance during the solving of practical activities and essay questions on the content covered. In addition, we used questionnaires to analyze students’ motivation during the course. Study results indicate an improvement in both motivation and performance of students participating in SPOC, which corroborates its applicability to the software testing teaching area.

Evaluation of the effectiveness of developing real-world software projects as a motivational device for bridging theory and practice

ABSTRACT While incorporating project-based exercise is a common practice in software engineering education, few studies have been conducted in investigating how real-world project development influences university students’ proactive learning and knowledge transformation. This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of developing real-world projects with industry engagement in encouraging students to apply knowledge to practice and be more proactive in learning. Using a two-group, post-test quasi-experimental design, the performance between the students taking real-world project development and the students in the control group are compared using descriptive statistics, the independent samples t-test and Welch t-test, accordingly. Both the Spearman’s rank-order and Kendall’s τ-b are used to examine the relationship between students’ practical works and the level of knowledge transformation estimated by the students through online surveys. The results suggest that using real-world projects in the classroom can be an effective motivational device for proactive learning and knowledge transformation. Project-based exercise should be both comprehensive and keeping pace with technology development driven by the software industry evolution to be more effective. The direct interaction with stakeholders, dynamic requirements change, employment of Agile methods, self-organising teams, and using challenging real-world projects, are essential in simulating a real-world software development environment in the classroom.

Playing, Constructionism, and Music in Early-Stage Software Engineering Education

Understanding that design involves trade-offs, thinking at multiple levels of abstraction, and considering the cohesion and coupling between sub-components of a larger whole is an important part of software (and other) engineering. It can be challenging to convey such abstract design concepts to novice engineers, especially for materials that are themselves abstract (e.g. software). Such challenges are compounded when teaching at the secondary school stage where students have limited experience of large-scale design problems that motivate the need for abstraction at all. In this paper, we describe a method for introducing these concepts to secondary school students using LEGO® and Raspberry Pi computers, asking them to build musical instruments as an entertaining way of motivating engagement with learning about design through play. The method has been successfully piloted in a series of three classroom sessions and key observations and experiences of using the method are presented.

The MESSIR Flexible Scientific Approach to Requirements Engineering

Among the software engineering development phases, requirements engineering is the one that has the most impact on project success or failure. To be executed in various contexts, there is an important need for flexibility and efficient tool support. A flexible requirements engineering method should include several levels allowing for more or less completeness and precision. Some project contexts would need a lightweight activity using structured natural language but still being guided and grounded partly on professional standards. Some more advanced projects would need more complete requirements documents and would benefit from a description language based on scientific notions allowing for better precision for specific system operations. Some business or safety critical systems would need an approach allowing for requirements simulation and verification. Requirements engineering education is an important objective to prepare future engineers to understand those requirements engineering needs and be prepared for practice in a professional setting. In the last five years, we have developed a requirements engineering method called Messir with a tool Excalibur and experiments in academia have been made to see how it was solving actual software engineering problems focusing first on requirements engineering education. Messir components represent in themselves some improvements w.r.t. the state of the art of the “standard” theories, methods and tools, mainly by introducing an improved requirements engineering process, language and verification support based on executable requirements specifications. Furthermore, the Messir approach solves also some actual problems related to software engineering education by offering a product line framework for setting up or improving courses in computer science curricula. The main result being to contribute to develop the software engineering capabilities of engineers and scientists that feed the job market in industry, research or education.

Using Blended Project-Based Learning to Teach Project Management to Software Engineering Students

Project-based learning (PBL) approaches are common in software engineering (SE) and project management education. However, the blended learning modality is still little explored in this context. The application of PBL in blended learning environments is called blended project-based learning (BPBL). In order to fill in this research gap, this study analyzed the implementation of an undergraduate SE project management course carried out in a Brazilian private university using the BPBL method. In order to evaluate the outcomes of the adoption of this method, a questionnaire was administered to students who were also invited to identify some lessons learned, assessed using content analysis. In terms of student performance and satisfaction, the results of this survey showed that student opinions are mixed. However, the students considered more “blended-ready” are said to be very satisfied with the experience and looking forward to another one. The outcomes of this study can be used to better prepare teachers and students to adopt BPBL in software project management courses.

Code-quality evaluation scheme for assessment of student contributions to programming projects

Project-based learning is the most common approach to software engineering education, due to its emphasis on the teamwork skills essential to real-world collaborations. This study developed an automated programming assessment system (APAS) featuring a code-quality evaluation scheme to overcome difficulties in assessing the contribution of individual team members. Team participation is visualized on a weekly basis to provide insights pertaining to team dynamics, and metrics based on code quality allow the segmentation of students by level of contribution. Insights provided by the proposed system were also shown to facilitate interventions aimed at improving code quality. Empirical analysis based on submission data from 146 students (41 teams) demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed system in monitoring group-based learning projects at the university level, particularly in detecting free-riders.

Improving Teamwork in Agile Software Engineering Education: The ASEST+ Framework

<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Contribution:</i> This article presents agile software engineers stick together (ASEST+), an improved version of a framework called ASEST that aims to develop team cohesion, leading to better team learning and software engineering student teams. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</i> Effective teamwork is crucial for agile software development’s success and is, therefore, a key topic of current software engineering education. In the previous work, a preliminary proposal for ASEST+ was presented. Here, an improved version, more suitable for agile practice education and considering cohesion antecedents, is described. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Intended Outcome:</i> A teaching-learning framework to support teamwork in agile software education. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Application Design:</i> ASEST+ is built around Scrum teams and combines learning strategies to train students in collaborative and technical agile practices. ASEST+ establishes policies for role allocation and team rule agreements to regulate communication and address conflict management agile practices. ASEST+ addresses personality traits, conflict resolution, and task interdependence as the antecedents identified as the most important. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Findings:</i> A quasiexperiment showed that the use of ASEST+ significantly increases the students’ positive perceptions on team cohesion, team performance, and team learning compared with the control group.

Software Engineering Education for the Next Generation SEENG 2021 Workshop Report

The 3rd International Workshop on Software Engineering Education for the Next Generation was held remotely on May 24, 2021. The workshop was an integral component of the Joint Track on Software Engineering Education and Training at the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering. It specifically supported the general theme of "Educating the Next Generation of Software Engineers". Building on its predecessors, the workshop used a highly interactive format, structured around eight short paper presentations to generate discussion topics, an activity to select the most interesting topics, and structured breakout sessions to allow participants to discuss those topics in detail. Participants presented the results of the breakout sessions using mind maps.

CHARACTERIZING SOFTWARE QUALITY ASSURANCE PRACTICES IN KENYA

Given the increased reliance on technology, Software Quality Assurance(SQA) has become a vital area in Software Engineering (SE). SQA practices require training, cost and often take more time than actual code writing. Owing to these requirements, software developers often ignore or partly implement SQA practices, leading to potentially poor quality software development. The goal of the study is to characterise SQA practices of software developers in Kenya. As such, quantitative empirical research was conducted. Seventy-seven (N=77) completed questionnaires were received and analysed to yield the required insights. The analysis of the findings indicates compliance with SQA practices. However, the research unearths concerns such as failure to comply with Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) models as having the potential to lower the quality of software products. The assessment found that Unit testing was the most common type of software test. Based on the findings and literature, recommendations are made. The need to improve software engineering education and invest in software testing is underscored. The results can be generalised to most developing countries and used by software developers and trainers to identify areas in SQA that need strengthening.

Swarm intelligence-based model for improving prediction performance of low-expectation teams in educational software engineering projects.

Software engineering is one of the most significant areas, which extensively used in educational and industrial fields. Software engineering education plays an essential role in keeping students up to date with software technologies, products, and processes that are commonly applied in the software industry. The software development project is one of the most important parts of the software engineering course, because it covers the practical side of the course. This type of project helps strengthening students’ skills to collaborate in a team spirit to work on software projects. Software project involves the composition of software product and process parts. Software product part represents software deliverables at each phase of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) while software process part captures team activities and behaviors during SDLC. The low-expectation teams face challenges during different stages of software project. Consequently, predicting performance of such teams is one of the most important tasks for learning process in software engineering education. The early prediction of performance for low-expectation teams would help instructors to address difficulties and challenges related to such teams at earliest possible phases of software project to avoid project failure. Several studies attempted to early predict the performance for low-expectation teams at different phases of SDLC. This study introduces swarm intelligence -based model which essentially aims to improve the prediction performance for low-expectation teams at earliest possible phases of SDLC by implementing Particle Swarm Optimization-K Nearest Neighbours (PSO-KNN), and it attempts to reduce the number of selected software product and process features to reach higher accuracy with identifying less than 40 relevant features. Experiments were conducted on the Software Engineering Team Assessment and Prediction (SETAP) project dataset. The proposed model was compared with the related studies and the state-of-the-art Machine Learning (ML) classifiers: Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO), Simple Linear Regression (SLR), Naïve Bayes (NB), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), standard KNN, and J48. The proposed model provides superior results compared to the traditional ML classifiers and state-of-the-art studies in the investigated phases of software product and process development.

CodeLabeller: A Web-Based Code Annotation Tool for Java Design Patterns and Summaries

With the rise of AI in SE, researchers have shown how AI can be applied to assist software developers in a wide variety of activities. However, it has not been accompanied by a complementary increase in labelled datasets, which is required in many supervised learning methods. Several studies have been using crowdsourcing platforms to collect labelled training data in recent years. However, research has shown that the quality of labelled data is unstable due to participant bias, knowledge variance, and task difficulty. Thus, we present CodeLabeller, a web-based tool that aims to provide a more efficient approach in handling the process of labelling Java source files at scale by improving the data collection process throughout, and improving the degree of reliability of responses by requiring each labeller to attach a confidence rating to each of their responses. We test CodeLabeller by constructing a corpus of over a thousand source files obtained from a large collection of opensource Java projects, and labelling each Java source file with their respective design patterns and summaries. Apart from assisting researchers to crowdsource a labelled dataset, the tool has practical applicability in software engineering education and assists in building expert ratings for software artefacts. This paper discusses the motivation behind the creation of CodeLabeller, the intended users, a tool demonstration and its UI, its implementation, benefits, and lastly, the evaluation through a user study and in-practice usage.

Combining Innovative Technology and Context based Approaches in Teaching Software Engineering

Sustainability in learning is very essential for a sustainable future which largely depends on education. Sustainable learning requires learners to increase and rebuild base-knowledge as the circumstances change and get more complex. This becomes very obvious particularly for in- formation technology (IT) discipline where technology is rapidly changing and practice getting more complicated. Sustainability enables students to use their learning from formal education into practice, provide hands on experience (HOE) and help them rebuild their knowledge base in complex situations. This is also essential to achieve a high graduate outcome rate (GOR) which helps the education sector to become sustainable. In the existing policies and frameworks, institutions are moving towards more off-campus learning and less face-to-face learning. As a result, a downward trend is experienced in students’ engagement across IT discipline. This affects students’ ability in achieving HOE and appears to be one of the reasons of low GOR which poses a threat to the sustainability in the education sector for both stakeholder and learners’ perspectives. This paper presents a combined approach of context-based teaching with incorporation of innovative technology to engage students and achieve a better HOE towards sustainability in learning. The proposed approach was adopted in a software engineering course taught at School of IT at Deakin University, Australia. Students were provided context-based teaching material and industry standard software engineering tools for practice to achieve HOE. Students evaluation and assessment results reports that proposed approach was significantly impacted positively to engage the students in classes towards improved sustainable learning.

Balanced, Unbalances, and One-Sided Distributed Teams - An Empirical View on Global Software Engineering Education

Balanced, Unbalances, and One-Sided Distributed Teams - An Empirical View on Global Software Engineering Education

Understanding students’ software development projects: Effort, performance, satisfaction, skills and their relation to the adequacy of outcomes developed

Given the inclusion of (often team-based) course projects in tertiary software engineering education, it is necessary to investigate software engineering curricula and students’ experiences while undergoing their software engineering training. Previous research efforts have not sufficiently explored students perceptions around the commitment and adequacy of effort spent on software engineering projects, their project performance and skills that are developed during course projects. This gap in skills awareness includes those that are necessary, anticipated and learned, and the challenges to student project success, which may predict project performance. Such insights could inform curricula design, theory and practice, in terms of improving post-study software development success. We conducted a survey involving undergraduate across four universities in New Zealand and Cyprus to explore these issues, where extensive deductive and inductive analyses were performed. Among our findings we observe that students’ commitment of effort on software engineering project seems appropriate. Students are more satisfied with their team’s collaboration performance than technical contributions, but we found that junior students seemed to struggle with teamwork. Further, we observe that the software students developed were of higher quality if they had worked in project teams previously, had stronger technical skills and were involved in timely meetings. This study singles out mechanisms for informing good estimation of effort, mentoring technical competencies and suitable coaching for enhancing project success and student learning.

Cadxela: An educational tool for supporting the global software engineering education at undergraduate level

AbstractThe Global Software Development (GSD) strategy has introduced many benefits into the modern software industry, but it has also created many risks that can negatively affect the quality of the final product. Moreover, this approach is still in constant evolution and, therefore, diverse issues and challenges related to geographical, temporal, and sociocultural distances are also present. Therefore, many universities around the world are increasing their efforts in creating programs to prepare more skilled graduates to work in globally distributed environments. However, providing GSD courses among universities distributed in different locations is not so profitable and normally involves a high number of collaborations among various teachers and students that traditional teaching approaches cannot support. In this study, the Cadxela tool is presented to enable undergraduate students to acquire practical experience in GSD and improve their communication and teamwork skills. An empirical evaluation was conducted on Cadxela involving students and teachers from five universities in Mexico, Spain, Chile, Cuba, and Peru. The participants developed a total of 15 projects to experience different problems related to geographical, temporal, and sociocultural distances. The obtained results from pre and post‐evaluations showed that Cadxela can contribute to facilitating the development of practical projects on GSD undergraduate courses, while students develop their knowledge, social skills associated with this topic as well as teamwork and communication skills. Finally, the data collected on the teachers' perceptions suggested that Cadxela can also be a useful tool for introducing the GSD approach at the undergraduate level.

Teaching Software Engineering using Abstraction through Modeling

Teaching software engineering (SWE) as a core computer science course (ACM, 2013) is a challenging task. The challenge lies in the emphasis on what a large-scale software means, implementing teamwork, and teaching abstraction in software design while simultaneously engaging students into reasonable coding tasks. The abstraction of the system design is perhaps the most critical and theoretical part of the course and requires early engagement of the students with the necessary topics followed by implementation of the abstract model consistently. Normally, students would take such courses in the undergraduate curriculum sequence after data structures and/or object-oriented design/programming. Therefore, they would be able to learn about systematic modeling of software as a system. In this work, we address how to facilitate the teaching of SWE by introducing abstract modeling. Furthermore, functional decomposition is reviewed as a critical component which in turn, requires understanding of how different tasks are accomplished by enterprise software. Combining such pieces with concepts of architecture and design patterns of software provides foundational knowledge for students to be able to navigate around enterprise software in the real world.

Introduction to the Special Issue

The topic of 2021’s special issue is The Role(s) of Abstraction in CS Education. Abstraction is a pillar of computational thinking and plays a key role in many CS related areas. In computational thinking abstraction is used to understand a problem, manage its complexity and select an appropriate level of detail and degree of generality when solving it. Procedural and data abstractions allow algorithms to be used without knowledge of their details. Besides, the ability to abstract facilitates generalization and knowledge transfer. Abstraction has been considered, either implicitly or explicitly, in the literature that covers top-down design of programs, system modelling and problem solving. However, teaching students to abstract when reading, designing or implementing code remains a challenge at both k-12 and tertiary level. Hence, our goal when proposing this special issue was to provide a range of papers that could help instructors to understand abstraction in more depth and to find approaches or insights on how to foster abstraction in the classroom. We have achieved that goal by collating eight papers that describe the multiple roles of abstraction in CS education. Three papers focus on programming skills, as teaching them is a core and challenging task for educators. Fowler et al. explore the abstraction skills needed to reason analytically about source code. Haglund, Strömbäck and Mannila focus on the challenges posed to students by functional abstraction, while Sbaraglia, Lodi and Martini discuss the abstraction mechanisms of programming languages and the rollercoaster of abstraction that students face at introductory level. Four papers present different perspectives of abstraction in specific CS fields. Dorodchi et al. discuss abstraction in modelling and its role in teaching software engineering; Strömbäck, Mannila and Kamkar investigate how students abstract the behaviour of concurrent programs; Ginat illustrates the use of abstraction to solve algorithmic tasks, and Vaníček, Šimandl and Klofáč identify computational tasks from the Bebras Challenge that would help to develop abstract thinking. Finally, Mirolo et al. provide an overview of abstraction in CS education literature that binds the different perspectives within computer science and computational thinking. We are thankful to the authors of this special issue for sharing their perspectives and their experiences on the use of abstraction in their fields.