Conference Session

Pedagogical Approaches for Software Engineering

Collection

2012 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Colin J. Neill, Pennsylvania State University; Joanna F. DeFranco, Pennsylvania State University, Great Valley; Raghvinder S. Sangwan, Pennsylvania State University, Great Valley

Tagged Divisions

Software Engineering Constituent Committee

the individuals on the team, where abenefit could be learning for example. Our results, however, do not support the hypothesis thatthe guidelines that facilitate effective student teams also improve individual team memberlearning.IntroductionSoftware engineering projects at anything other than the smallest scales involve teams ofengineers. It is not surprising then, that courses in software engineering often include group andteam projects as part of both the students’ learning and their assessment. An informal survey ofthe courses in our own graduate software engineering program revealed that over half includegroup projects that contribute significantly (30% or more) to a student’s final grade. This isapparently in line with other engineering

Conference Session

Software Engineering Constituent Committee Division Technical Session 1

Collection

2014 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Tanmay Bhowmik, Mississippi State University; Nan Niu, Mississippi State University; Donna Reese, Mississippi State University

Tagged Divisions

Software Engineering Constituent Committee

graduates joining large softwaredevelopment organizations generally spend their first several months of employment perform-ing corrective and perfective maintenance tasks. Finding the right piece of source code rel-evant to the change request in an unfamiliar software project is among the initial challengesfaced by such new developers. Thus, it is crucial for the Software Engineering educationalprogram to equip the students with core skills to effectively and efficiently locate a concern inthe code base and relate the code to other Software Engineering artifacts.The field of tracking a concern throughout the development life cycle is known as softwaretraceability. This line of research has its root in Gotel and Finkelstein’s seminal work10 on re

Conference Session

Software Engineering Pedagogical Approaches

Collection

2013 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Joanna F. DeFranco, Pennsylvania State University; Colin J. Neill, Pennsylvania State University

Tagged Divisions

Software Engineering Constituent Committee

team-working, andallow students to tackle problems of larger scales and complexities than they could otherwise doalone. Furthermore, there is evidence that collaborative learning methods are more effectivethan the traditional teacher-centered methodology 3,4. Finally, the Accreditation Board forEngineering and Technology (ABET) expects students to gain proficiency in team work5. Whilethe reasons for their inclusion are numerous, team-based projects, and team-based assessments inparticular, are not without their problems.One focus of our research has been in addressing the difficulties students experience in team-work. We have developed a framework of guidelines and practices that facilitate effectiveteams. The framework has been successful

Conference Session

Software Engineering Constituent Committee Division Technical Session 2

Collection

2014 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Gustavo Lopez, Universidad de Costa Rica; Alexandra Martinez, Universidad de Costa Rica

Tagged Divisions

Software Engineering Constituent Committee

activity in the Computer Science training curricula20. At the University of CostaRica, the Bachelor of Science’s program in Computer and Information Science offers anelective undergraduate course in software resting, and Master of Science’s program in Com-puter and Information Science offers an elective graduate course in software testing as well.Both are 4-credit-hour courses, with 64 hours of class time in a 16-week semester. The un-dergraduate and graduate versions of the courses are very similar in their core contents(since the undergraduate course is not pre-requisite for the graduate one), differing mainlyon the applied research project (only performed at graduate level), advanced topics presentedby students (topics and depth vary according