Conference Session

Software Engineering Teaching Methods and Practice

Collection

2006 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Frank Tsui, Southern Polytechnic State University; Orlando Karam, Southern Polytechnic State University

Tagged Divisions

Software Engineering Constituent Committee

© American Society for Engineering Education, 2006 Analyzing Communications Activities in Student Software ProjectsIntroductionIt is well recognized that communications among the team members play an importantpart in the success of team projects1. This paper examines and characterizes the amountof communications that take place in the different activities and phases of softwaredevelopment projects. An important set of activities, project management, is alsoincluded in our study.Previous research2 has shown that team communications and team performance has acurvilinear relationship. Several studies7,8 have shown that effective communication isrelated to success in information technology projects. Some preliminary

Conference Session

Tools and Support for Software Education

Collection

2006 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Yung-Hsiang Lu, Purdue University; Evan Zelkowitz, Purdue University; Mark C Johnson, Purdue University

Tagged Divisions

Software Engineering Constituent Committee

. For example, an instructor mayrequire one line of comment for every ten lines of codes. These numbers are determinedwithout sufficient scientific support; hence, students may resist the requirements and treatthem as burdens. Open-source programs are widely used today and they can be considered as samples forteaching programming. We analyze 6 open-source software projects with 6233 files and 3.27million lines of code to discover their commonalities. The projects are python, gdb, emacs,httpd, kde, and doxygen. These open-source programs are used and contributed by manyprogrammers. These particular programs are selected as examples of high quality code byvirtue of their extensive and successful use in industry and academia. These programs

Conference Session

Software Engineering Curriculum Support

Collection

2006 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Jayathi Raghavan, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University; Massood Towhidnejad, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University-Daytona Beach

Tagged Divisions

Software Engineering Constituent Committee

2006-424: CHALLENGES/ISSUES IN A INDUSTRY-ACADEMICCOLLABORATIONJayathi Raghavan, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Jayathi Raghavan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. She received her Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics in 2000 and MS in Computer Science in 1998 from Washington State University. Dr. Raghavan has taught a variety of mathematics courses, programming and database systems courses for the past six years. Her current area of interests are, Computational Mathematics, Database Systems and Software Engineering. She has worked on industry and government funded projects in the area of database systems and mathematics

Conference Session

Tools and Support for Software Education

Collection

2006 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Barbara Gannod, Arizona State University; Kevin Gary, Arizona State University; Harry Koehnemann, Arizona State University

Tagged Divisions

Software Engineering Constituent Committee

recite the basicprinciples, but who lack the comprehension to apply them. These types of courses are thenfollowed by courses that delve into a specific process area in significant depth, for example aSoftware Design or a Software Quality Assurance course. These courses focus on deep skillsdevelopment within the narrow process area. Students then complete the program with thecapstone project, which asks them to apply this knowledge in a full semester project. Studentsdo not get exposure to the full engineering process spectrum in a manner that allows them toapply the deeper skillsets they may have developed in a particular area. The results are studentswho can claim knowledge of a particular skill, but lack the context in which to apply

Conference Session

Software Engineering Curriculum Components

Collection

2006 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Michael Lutz, Rochester Institute of Technology; Gregory Hislop, Drexel University; Mark Sebern, Milwaukee School of Engineering

Tagged Divisions

Software Engineering Constituent Committee

intended to foster discussion within the software engineeringcommunity about developing and maintaining shared curriculum resources on an on-going basis.The paper approaches this topic by summarizing the experience of the SWENET project increating shared curriculum materials for software engineering. SWENET, The NetworkCommunity for Software Engineering Education, was an NSF funded project to developcurriculum modules for faculty members wanting to incorporate software engineering conceptsin new or existing courses. The paper discusses the project results, focusing on lessons learned.Although the benefit of sharing course materials is obvious, the practice is not particularly widespread in higher education. Reasons for this low level of sharing

Conference Session

Software Engineering Teaching Methods and Practice

Collection

2006 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Bruce Maxim, University of Michigan

Tagged Divisions

Software Engineering Constituent Committee

will continue to exceed that of the motion picture industry.7 Computer gamedevelopment is big business.The development of computer games is labor-intensive. Today, game developers rarely buildcomputer games on their own, as they did 15 years ago. Many best-selling computer gamescontain thousands of lines of code and have multi-million dollar development budgets. Moderngame development requires the effort of a team of skilled professionals to integrate multimediacontent and complex computer software. Game development projects have a reputation for latedelivery times and cost over runs. In December 2005, consumers observed hardware failures inthe first Xbox 360 consoles delivered to consumers and the recall of a popular Nintendo GameCube

Conference Session

Software Engineering Curriculum Components

Collection

2006 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Deepti Suri, Milwaukee School of Engineering; Mark Sebern, Milwaukee School of Engineering

Tagged Divisions

Software Engineering Constituent Committee

Society for Engineering Education, 2006 Software Development Laboratory: A Retrospective Abstract At Milwaukee School of Engineering(MSOE), undergraduate students work on a one academic year (three quarters) Software Development Laboratory (SDL) course sequence in their junior/senior year. SDL was created with a vision of providing a “real-life” team experience to students where they could unite theory and practice while working on large scale ongoing projects in the context of a standardized development process. This paper presents a retrospective on the pedagogical philosophy of the SDL and the specific challenges that we are currently facing in executing this

Conference Session

Software Engineering Teaching Methods and Practice

Collection

2006 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Eric Durant, Milwaukee School of Engineering

Tagged Divisions

Software Engineering Constituent Committee

Requirements and Interdisciplinary WorkAbstractThe author discusses an interdisciplinary approach to helping students learn to write a systemrequirements specification (SRS). This approach has been refined during use over the last threeyears and involves students in the first quarter of their junior year. Software engineeringstudents enrolled in a required requirements course act as the requirements team over an eight-week period while biomedical engineering students who are ready to begin the requirementsphase of their capstone design project act as clients. Each of the requirements and client teamsconsists of four to six members. The experience was documented in ASEE conference papers inOctober of 20041 and June of 20052.Benefits of the process and

Conference Session

Software Engineering Curriculum Components

Collection

2006 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Donald Bagert, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

Tagged Divisions

Software Engineering Constituent Committee

domain tracks to the coordinators of those programs (see Appendix A); five werefilled out and returned. The responding schools and their application domains are listed in Table1. Page 11.1325.3 Institution Application Domains Auburn University Senior Project domain area, including • Artificial Intelligence • Compiler Front-ends • Database Systems • Software

Conference Session

Software Engineering Teaching Methods and Practice

Collection

2006 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

James Walden, Northern Kentucky University; Rose Shumba, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Tagged Divisions

Software Engineering Constituent Committee

purpose of a software engineering class at our institutions is to teach students how towork in teams to develop a secure software project from specification through delivery. The soft-ware engineering class has prerequisite classes in programming, but has no security prerequisites.Therefore all security concepts necessary for our secure software development processes must beintroduced in the software engineering class. As a single semester doesn’t offer the necessary time to broadly cover information securityin addition to software engineering, the class focuses on security topics that fit directly into thesoftware development lifecycle. For example, the course teaches students how to securely usecryptographic APIs in their projects but

Conference Session

Tools and Support for Software Education

Collection

2006 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

J. Scott Hawker, Rochester Institute of Technology

Tagged Divisions

Software Engineering Constituent Committee

Department at RIT. He has worked with the NASA Technical Standards Program applying semantic web, formal modeling, information retrieval, and other advanced information technology to better create, manage, find, deliver, and use standards and lessons learned for aerospace system engineering. He is now applying these technologies in development of tools for collaborative learning in software engineering courses and projects. Dr. Hawker is a member of the IEEE, IEEE Computer Society, ACM, American Society for Engineering Education, Standards Engineering Society, and the Association of Aerospace Standards Users

Conference Session

Software Engineering Teaching Methods and Practice

Collection

2006 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Yung-Hsiang Lu, Purdue University; Mark C Johnson, Purdue University

Tagged Divisions

Software Engineering Constituent Committee

teams resort to simple strategies. Instead, the in-structor should provide a reference player that implements an advanced strategy and thenencourage students to defeat this reference player.IntroductionA typical course on software engineering discusses software process, project management,requirement and design, and maintenance.4, 14 While these topics provide a theoretical foun-dation for the students to construct large-scale software, these concepts can be better con-veyed through a semester-long team project. Students can learn how to collaborate withtheir teammates in the project. A recent study13 suggested that students would be bettermotivated through competition. In the spring semester of 2005, a senior-level course onsoftware

Conference Session

Software Engineering Teaching Methods and Practice

Collection

2006 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Martin Zhao, Mercer University; Laurie White, Mercer University

Tagged Divisions

Software Engineering Constituent Committee

orietation) and the cutting-edge technologies. Not enough effort seems tohave been made to show how the models and principles discussed in the texts can be applied toreal world projects.A team-based software project is commonly included in a contemporary software engineering Page 11.542.2class to give students hands-on experience of the issues that they may encounter in a real-world 1development environment. It is commonly accepted that the best strategy is to guide the studentsto learn software engineering by really doing it. 3, 12 Some new textbooks 4, 3 devote moredetailed coverage on latest OOAD

Conference Session

Tools and Support for Software Education

Collection

2006 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Ben Garbers, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse; Kasi Periyasamy, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse

Tagged Divisions

Software Engineering Constituent Committee

process and is error-prone. This paper describes an interactive tooldeveloped at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse that assists students preparing an SRSdocument based on the IEEE standard 83019981. The tool provides an easy-to-use interface andthe ability to create, edit, load and save SRS documents. In addition, it evaluates therequirements document based on criteria published by the Software Metrics program at theSoftware Assurance Technology Center, NASA2. A function-point metrics analyzer is also builtinto the tool so that the efforts required to complete the project specified in the document can beevaluated.IntroductionA project-oriented course in Software Engineering generally requires the students to analyze therequirements for the

Conference Session

Software Engineering Curriculum Components

Collection

2006 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Harry Koehnemann, Arizona State University

Tagged Divisions

Software Engineering Constituent Committee

systemsengineering process has become an important factor for the student’s success as well as thesuccess of large systems.This paper discusses the addition of systems engineering activities to an existing course titled“Internet-enabled Embedded Devices.” The course is offered in the Division of ComputingStudies at Arizona State University at the Polytechnic Campus. The course objectives originallyintroduced students to systems built from loosely coupled embedded devices communicating viaa network. Projects were fairly substantial and ranged from making embedded devicesaccessible through the web (e.g., a browser-controlled sprinkler timer) to systems built fromloosely coupled devices communicating via the Internet (e.g., integrated traffic control signals

Conference Session

Software Engineering Curriculum Support

Collection

2006 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Sheryl Duggins, Southern Polytechnic State University

Tagged Divisions

Software Engineering Constituent Committee

-defined process description can better coordinate thework of individuals and track their progress. As new methods are identified, they areincorporated into the process definition, facilitating learning by allowing new projects to build onprior experiences.The Capability Maturity Model provides a way for organizations to assess the capabilities oftheir current software processes and to focus on improving those processes. The CMM definesfive levels of progressively more mature process capability 4.“1. Initial: The software process is characterized as ad hoc and occasionally even chaotic. Fewprocesses are defined, and success depends on individual effort.2. Repeatable: Basic project management processes are established to track cost, schedule

Conference Session

Software Engineering Curriculum Support

Collection

2006 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Joseph Clifton, University of Wisconsin-Platteville

Tagged Divisions

Software Engineering Constituent Committee

to increase the success rate,which was still below 50% despite earlier attempts at improvement. Another reason was toreintroduce C++ material that had been dropped from the curriculum. Yet another reason was toincorporate more software engineering practices by having students: • write design documents, test plans, and test specifications • participate in reviews and inspections • use version control • do some programs/projects in teamsAlthough the software engineering additions were primarily in support of the newly-createdsoftware engineering program, it was felt that these changes would also benefit the computerscience students, since the majority of the computer science students took software developmentjobs after

Conference Session

Software Engineering Curriculum Support

Collection

2006 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

James McDonald, Monmouth University

Tagged Divisions

Software Engineering Constituent Committee

2006-53: USING EMPLOYER SURVEYS TO DETERMINE THE EXTENT TOWHICH EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES ARE BEING ACHIEVEDJames McDonald, Monmouth University JAMES MCDONALD is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Software Engineering at Monmouth University, West Long Branch, New Jersey. He teaches and consults in the areas of software engineering, software project management and software quality. He has BSEE and MSEE degrees from New Jersey Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, respectively, and a PhD from New York University. Page 11.1384.1© American Society for Engineering