Student experiences in large undergraduate Computer Science courses are increasingly impacted by automated systems. Bots, or agents of software automation, are useful for efficiently grading and generating feedback. Current efforts at automation in CS education focus on supporting instructional tasks, but do not address student struggles due to poor behaviors, such as procrastination. In this paper, we explore using bots to improve the software engineering behaviors of students using developer recommendation choice architectures, a framework incorporating behavioral science concepts in recommendations to improve the actions of programmers. We implemented this framework in class-bot, a novel system designed to nudge students to make better choices while working on programming assignments. This work presents a preliminary evaluation integrating this tool in an introductory programming course. Our results show that class-bot is beneficial for improving student development behaviors increasing code quality and productivity.
Student evaluations of teaching (SET) are commonly used in universities for assessing teaching quality. However, previous literature shows that in software engineering students tend to rate certain topics higher than others: In particular students tend to value programming and software construction over software design, software engineering models and methods, or soft skills. We hypothesize that these biases also play a role in SET responses collected from students. The objective of this study is to investigate how the topic of a software engineering course affects the SET metrics. We accompli…
Software Engineering as an industry is highly diverse in terms of development methods and practices. Practitioners employ a myriad of methods and tend to further tailor them by e.g. omitting some practices or rules. This diversity in development methods poses a challenge for software engineering education, creating a gap between education and industry. General theories such as the Essence Theory of Software Engineering can help bridge this gap by presenting software engineering students with higher-level frameworks upon which to build an understanding of software engineering methods and practi…
This research work aims to study personality profiles and temperaments of Pakistani software engineering professors and students. In this survey we have collected personality profiles of 18 professors and 92 software engineering students. According to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) instrument, the most prominent personality type among professors as well as among students is a combination of Introversion, Sensing, Thinking, and Judging (ISTJ). The study shows ITs (Introverts and Thinking) and IJs (Introverts and Judging) are the leading temperaments among the professors. About the stude…
Hidden Figures in Software Engineering: A Replication Study Exploring Undergraduate Software Students' Awareness of Distinguished Scientists from Underrepresented Groups
Unfair work distribution in student teams is a common issue in project-based learning. One contributing factor is that students are differently skilled developers. In a course with group work intertwining engineering and business aspects, we designed an intervention to help novice programmers, i.e., we introduced mandatory programming lab sessions. However, the intervention did not affect the work distribution, showing that more is needed to balance the workload. Contrary to our goal, the intervention was very well received among experienced students, but unpopular with students weak at progra…
Students of software engineering struggle to develop a systems perspective because most of the software engineering methodologies focus on developing a particular aspect of a system. Lack of unified coverage to the topic of systems modelling is identified as the root cause behind this problem. The paper explains the role of ontology in building systems perspective. A case for the necessity of ontology training as a means to overcome this problem is presented. The course content for a typical course on ontology is also described in the paper.
For software development companies, one of the most important objectives is to identify and acquire talented software engineers in order to maintain a skilled team that can produce competitive products. Traditional approaches for finding talented young software engineers are mainly through programming contests of various forms which mostly test participants' programming skills. However, successful software engineering in practice requires a wider range of skills from team members including analysis, design, programming, testing, communication, collaboration, and self-management, etc. In this p…
Universities conduct examinations to evaluate acquired skills and knowledge gained by students. An assessment of skills and knowledge levels evaluated during Software Engineering examinations is presented in this paper. The question items asked during examinations are analyzed from three dimensions that are cognitive levels, knowledge levels and knowledge areas. The Revised Bloom's Taxonomy is used to classify question items along the dimensions of cognitive levels and knowledge levels. Question items are also classified in various knowledge areas specified in ACM/IEEE's Computer Science Curri…
Should students be used as experimental subjects in software engineering? Given that students are in many cases readily available and cheap it is no surprise that the vast majority of controlled experiments in software engineering use them. But they can be argued to constitute a convenience sample that may not represent the target population (typically "real" developers), especially in terms of experience and proficiency. This causes many researchers (and reviewers) to have reservations about the external validity of student-based experiments, and claim that students should not be used. Based …
How Software Engineering Students Use LLMs to Write Research Papers: An Experience Report
University of Calgary（卡尔加里大学）；CESAR School（CESAR学院）；University of Bari（巴里大学）；Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco (UFRPE)（伯南布哥联邦农村大学）；University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa（夏威夷大学马诺阿分校）
Peer assessment is a popular technique for a more fine-grained evaluation of individual students in group projects. Its effect on the evaluation is well studied. However, its effects on the learning abilities of students are often overlooked. In this paper, we explore self-evaluation, motivation, and study time of students in relation to peer assessment, as part of an ongoing project at our local Faculty of Engineering Technology. The aggregated measurements of two years so far show that: (1) students get much better at evaluating their own project on some, but not all, of the evaluation crite…
Students enrolled in software engineering degrees are generally required to undertake a research project in their final year through which they demonstrate the ability to conduct research, communicate outcomes, and build in-depth expertise in an area. Assessment in these projects typically involves evaluating the product of their research via a thesis or a similar artifact. However, this misses a range of other factors that go into producing successful software engineers and researchers. Incorporating aspects such as process, attitudes, project complexity, and supervision support into the asse…
Programming and software engineering courses in computer science curricula typically focus on both providing theoretical knowledge of programming languages and best-practices, and developing practical development skills. In a massive course - several hundred students - the teachers are not able to adequately attend to the practical part, therefore process automation and incentives to students must be used to drive the students in the right direction. Our goals was to design an automated programming assignment infrastructure capable of supporting massive courses. The infrastructure should encou…
The aim of this investigation was to establish the personality profile of Brazilian software engineering students according to the MBTI. This study also shows that the software engineering field attracts students of some types more than other types, for instance: Is, Ps, IPs, TPs, and INs are significantly represented in that group as opposed to E, Js, EJs, TJs, ENs.
Software Engineering courses play an important role for preparing students with the right knowledge and attitude for software development in practice. The implication is far reaching, as the quality of the software that we use ultimately depends on the quality of the people that make them. Educating Software Engineering, however, is quite challenging, as the subject is not considered as most exciting by students, while teachers often have to deal with exploding number of students. The EU project IMPRESS seeks to explore the use of gamification in educating software engineering at the universit…
Background: Software project management activities help to introduce software process models in Software Engineering courses. However, these activities should be adequately aligned with the learning outcomes and support student's progression. Objective: Present and evaluate an approach to help students acquire theoretical and practical knowledge and experience real-world software projects' challenges. The approach combines a serious game and a design-implement task in which students develop a controlled-scale software system. Method: To evaluate our approach, we analyzed the students' percepti…
Contribution: A flipped classroom approach to teaching empirical software engineering increases student learning by providing more time for active learning in class. Background: There is a need for longitudinal studies of the flipped classroom approach in general. Although a few cross-sectional studies show that a flipped classroom approach can increase student learning by providing more time for other in-class activities, such as active learning, such studies are also rare in the context of teaching software engineering. Intended outcomes: To assess the usefulness of a flipped classroom appro…
Students often learn formal methods as part of a software engineering degree programme, without applying these formal methods outside of the specific module(s) dedicated to this subject. In particular, software engineering students often have to build a significant application/program/system in a substantial project at the end of their programme (in order to demonstrate the application of the things they have learned during the previous taught modules). Our experience shows that the majority of students do not use formal methods in this project work. We report on feedback from the minority of …
We live in exceptional times in which the entire world is witnessing the exponential spread of a pandemic, which requires to adopt new habits of mind and behaviors. In this paper, I introduce the term exponential competence, which encompasses these cognitive and social skills, and describe a course for computer science and software engineering students in which emphasis is placed on exponential competence. I argue that exponential competence is especially important for computer science and software engineering students, since many of them will, most likely, be required to deal with exponential…
Capstone courses in undergraduate software engineering are a critical final milestone for students. These courses allow students to create a software solution and demonstrate the knowledge they accumulated in their degrees. However, a typical capstone project team is small containing no more than 5 students and function independently from other teams. To better reflect real-world software development and meet industry demands, we introduce in this paper our novel capstone course. Each student was assigned to a large-scale, multi-team (i.e., company) of up to 20 students to collaboratively buil…
Context. Software Engineering (SE) has low female representation due to gender bias that men are better at programming. Pair programming (PP) is common in industry and can increase student interest in SE, especially women; but if gender bias affects PP, it may discourage women from joining the field. Objective. We explore gender bias in PP. In a remote setting where students cannot see their peers' gender, we study how perceived productivity, technical competency and collaboration/interaction behaviors of SE students vary by perceived gender of their remote partner. Method. We developed an onl…
National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；Shanxi Supercomputing Center（山西超级计算中心）；Taiyuan University of Technology（太原理工大学）
Aiming at the current problems of theory-oriented,practice-light,and lack of innovation ability in the teaching of postgraduate software engineering courses,a multi-stage feedback teaching mode for software engineering postgraduates based on competition project_driven is proposed. The model is driven by the competition project,and implementing suggestions are given in terms of stage allocation of software engineering course tasks and ability cultivation,competition case design and process evaluation improvement,etc. Through the implementation of this teaching mode,students enthusiasm and initi…
[Context] In software engineering research, emphasis is given to sound evaluations of new approaches. While industry surveys or industrial case studies are preferred to evaluate industrial applicability, controlled experiments with student participants are commonly used to determine measurements such as effectiveness and efficiency of a proposed approach. [Objectives] In this paper, we elaborate on the current state of the art of controlled experiments using student participants. As student participants are commonly only reluctantly accepted in scientific communities and threats regarding the …
Project-based learning (PBL) is a student-centered and learn-by-doing approach that organizes learning around projects. While entrepreneurship and PBL in SE education are thrilling research topics, there seems to be very little work focusing on the pros and cons of involving external stakeholders to support real demands in software engineering education. Working on real projects also supports students to acquire leadership skills, such as communication, project management, and teamwork. This paper describes a case study integrating students from different Software Engineering programs and invo…
Many studies have shown the benefits of introducing open-source projects into teaching Software Engineering (SE) courses. However, there are several limitations of existing studies that limit the wide adaptation of open-source projects in a classroom setting, including (1) the selected project is limited to one particular project, (2) most studies only investigated on its effect on teaching a specific SE concept, and (3) students may make mistakes in their contribution which leads to poor quality code. Meanwhile, software companies have successfully launched programs like Google Summer of Code…
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 coordin…
I welcome the contribution from Falessi et al. [1] hereafter referred to as F++ , and the ensuing debate. Experimentation is an important tool within empirical software engineering, so how we select participants is clearly a relevant question. Moreover as F++ point out, the question is considerably more nuanced than the simple dichotomy it might appear to be at first sight. This commentary is structured as follows. In Section 2 I briefly summarise the arguments of F++ and comment on their approach. Next, in Section 3, I take a step back to consider the nature of representativeness in inferenti…
Feedback is critical in education. This Innovative Practice Full Paper reports lessons learned from improving the quality of feedback in a semi-capstone software engineering course, with particular focus on how to deliver productive feedback in large scale during project work. The bachelor-level introduction to software engineering course is taken by about 500 students from eight study programs, organised into 72 project teams. The course aims to educate reflective systems developers. The teaching staff includes 29 teaching assistants as supervisor and product owners for teams. Project teams g…
Software organizations have relied on process and technology initiatives to compete in a highly globalized world. Unfortunately, that has led to little or no success. We propose that the organizations start working on people initiatives, such as inspiring egoless behavior among software developers. This paper proposes a multi-stage approach to develop egoless behavior and discusses the universality of the egoless behavior by studying cohorts from three different countries, i.e., Japan, India, and Canada. The three stages in the approach are self-assessment, peer validation, and action plan dev…
