Abstract:

This paper addresses how a university course can by adjusted to better meet the challenges faced by new employees in the Software (SW) industry. The discrepancy between the theoretical approach in implementation of the Introduction to Software Engineering course and the needs of today’s SW industry has been recognized by experienced professionals from SW industry who are also engaged as university lecturers.

Furthermore, it has been recognized that the differences between coding, programming and SW development need to be additionally explained and demonstrated to students [1]. For potential future work in the SW industry, besides the programming skills, students need to gain more knowledge about the SW development process. Namely, sometimes this turns out to be more problematic for the new employees in the SW development company than the code writing itself.

Therefore, the course contents and the means of its realization have been adjusted in order to enhance students’ employability in contemporary SW development company. In particular, during the course students are familiarized with Agile methodologies for SW development through the simulation of work in a company organized throughout the entire duration of the course. This includes activities such as teamwork organized in Scrum sprints, project planning, task prioritization, risk mitigation, SW verification and validation, quantification of the produced SW quality and team efficiency. Also, the presentation of the solution proposal at the beginning of the project as well as presentation of completed tasks after each sprint are included since they have been identified as important components of the SW development process.

The presented course adjustments are validated via two metrics. The first one features the official university course quality surveys while the second features the student effort assessment. Finally, the paper presents the comparison between the results of the suggested formal educational approach, based on workload formed as 30 hours of lectures and 30 hours of seminars, with the results achieved in companies through non-formal and informal education [2].

References:
[1] Dooley, J.F. (2017). Introduction to Software Development. In: Software Development, Design and Coding. Apress, Berkeley, CA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3153-1_1
[2] Cedefop, European guidelines for validating non-formal and informal learning, Publications Office, 2016, https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2801/378817

Keywords:

Software Engineering, Software Development, University-Industry Collaboration, Programming, Coding, Testing, Software Quality, Employability, Agile, Education.