Building XP process metrics for project-based software engineering courses

Project-based courses are widely used in software engineering curricula. In this report, we examine two issues related to project-based software engineering courses: 1) what processes should we include in the course, and 2) in order to achieve formative assessments, how can we build process metrics. In the first part, we combine a field study on professional Agile (eXtreme Programming, XP) teams and an established team process taxonomy to “proactively” select team processes to include in a project-based software engineering course. We choose processes that are 1) considered essential by professionals, and 2) complete with respect to coverage of the taxonomy’s main categories. A case study shows that the augmented course design improves learning outcomes. In the second part, we establish the importance of measuring processes in project-based software engineering courses and present metrics mined from software development tools for monitoring and observing processes to facilitate teaching. A case study confirms that teams with better conformance to software development processes achieve better outcomes. Methods presented in this report can be used to improve software engineering courses. Some future studies are discussed in this report, envisioning a systematic method for improving and automating software engineering courses.

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