Conference Session

Software Engineering Teaching Techniques

Collection

2009 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Clifton Kussmaul, Muhlenberg College

Tagged Divisions

Software Engineering Constituent Committee

AC 2009-1516: SOFTWARE PROJECTS USING FREE AND OPEN-SOURCESOFTWARE: OPPORTUNITIES, CHALLENGES, AND LESSONS LEARNEDClifton Kussmaul, Muhlenberg College Clif Kussmaul is Associate Professor of Computer Science at Muhlenberg College and Chief Technology Officer for Elegance Technologies, Inc., which develops software products and provides software development services. Previously he worked at NeST Technologies, and Moravian College. He has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Davis, master's degrees from Dartmouth College, and bachelor's degrees from Swarthmore College. His professional interests and activities include software engineering, entrepreneurship, digital

Conference Session

SE Curriculum and Course Management

Collection

2009 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Richard Stansbury, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University; Massood Towhidnejad, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

Tagged Divisions

Software Engineering Constituent Committee

projects is challenging. Ideally, everystudent would work toward the project goals with an equal level of effort resulting in all studentsin the course sharing the same final grade for the project. Unfortunately, this is not realistic. Inthis paper, a number of approaches to student assessment including peer and leader evaluation,ranking systems, etc. are discussed. Based on some of these ideas and the goal of providingstudents with frequent feedback, a new assessment approach for the computer and softwareengineering senior design course at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University is presented, whichutilizes rubrics to judge each student’s personal contribution and frequent delivery of theassessment so that students may iteratively improve their

Conference Session

Software Engineering Teaching Techniques

Collection

2009 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

J. Scott Hawker, Rochester Institute of Technology

Tagged Divisions

Software Engineering Constituent Committee

separately identifiedand addressed. As the organization matures, additional roles and specializations are separatedout and addressed, such as project management, architecture design, and quality assurance.We are now seeing an additional, distinct role in maturing software development organizations:Software Process Engineer. In some organizations, the task of defining the software process(process engineering) and tracking its execution is the responsibility of the project manager. Inother organizations, a quality assurance organization defines a process for a project, and theproject manager tracks its execution. Regardless of the organization or person assigned the role,though, it has become useful to separate the activities of process engineering

Conference Session

Software Engineering Teaching Techniques

Collection

2009 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Janusz Zalewski, Florida Gulf Coast University; Andrew Kornecki, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University; Jerzy Nogiec, Fermi National Accelerator Lab

Tagged Divisions

Software Engineering Constituent Committee

real-time applications, suchas sensor networks, flight control systems, accelerator control, road vehicle control, and others,are all distributed and for proper operation require very different programming techniques thantraditional systems. Typical software engineering curricula rarely include respectivemethodologies of software development for such systems. If they do, their courses mostlyconcentrate on the specification and design of software for distributed systems, but stop short ofincluding thorough treatment of implementation and testing issues. The current work builds upon previous experiences of the authors and involves projects inteaching software development for distributed real-time data acquisition and control systems,with

Conference Session

SE Curriculum and Course Management

Collection

2009 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Francis Lutz, Monmouth University; James McDonald, Monmouth University

Tagged Divisions

Software Engineering Constituent Committee

University, earned a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from New Jersey Institute of Technology, an MSEE degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a PhD from New York University. Dr. McDonald has an extensive industrial background in both software and electrical engineering. Prior to assuming his present position he worked at AT&T, Bell Laboratories, Bellcore and, most recently, at Lucent Technologies. He has taught numerous courses and workshops in the areas of operations research, microeconomics, quality management and project management. He has been responsible for systems engineering work on various types of telecommunications products, research in the areas of

Conference Session

SE Curriculum and Course Management

Collection

2009 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Zulfa Zakaria, IIUM

Tagged Divisions

Software Engineering Constituent Committee

lecturers who were experienced teachers in these courses. However,as the tutor taught the course for more than one semester, it is considered that the answer isacceptable.The second issue related to one course which was taught by two lecturers in the same semester.Lecturer A taught from Week 1 until Week 7 and Lecturer B from Week 8 until Week 13. Table5 shows that for Category 1, after a follow-up discussion, the responses from Lecturer Aappeared incomplete. The reason was that Lecture A did not tick the right answer for thiscategory because he overlooked it. There was also some confusion about practical work in thiscourse in that it was considered either as assignments or as a project. This probably explains thedifferences revealed for Category 3