Abstract:

Software engineering brings together three distinct disciplines, i.e., engineering, management, and organizational science. It requires active engagement of the team in solving complex problems of different nature or level of abstraction. The teaching can focus on describing problems, constructs, and methods that have been used on software engineering projects. At the laboratory level, this approach is accompanied by the so called toy project, with small teams of four to six students who try to implement a software system and produce a report on their work or some documentation. The problem here may not be the project size itself, as it has often been reported, but the knowledge the team has and the level of detail it has been capable of dealing with when building the system.
Another approach discussed here is focused on the software lifecycle and knowledge needed to successfully complete the activities. This pedagogy is concerned with engineering design and technology used in the process. Here, we use the term engineering design as applying a method to solve problems related to the software system development. In doing so, it is expected that students will spend most of their time dealing with software specification and design issues, while managerial and organizational issues will arise within the team context and be dealt with accordingly. Students work either on a small or large laboratory project. Although small projects cannot provide the same extensive coverage of the syllabus as large projects can, they still demand similar cognitive and other skills and produce a complete set of documents as per software lifecycle.
We report on our experience with both pedagogies over a two year period, using one approach in each academic year, but the learning outcome remained the same. The first approach, in the first year, was backed up by Ian Sommerville’s textbook, and the second by Bruegge and Dutoit’s. The students came from three different curricula, and the class size in the second year was three times that in the first year. The difference in the outcome and in the meeting of the learning outcome has been strongly in favor of the second pedagogy. In this paper we compare the outcomes, provide a number of examples that explain the issues that the students had to deal with, and how the change in the pedagogy has improved the quality of the laboratory work without changing the project framework itself.

Keywords:

object-oriented, software engineering, uml.