Work in progress - project ClockIt: profiling and improving student software development practices

Achieving quality and schedule targets continue to be serious problems in the software industry. This "software crisis" is not new, and is not helped by the fact that new computer science/engineering graduates often have little experience with schedule estimation. Poor development habits acquired early on are not always corrected by the one or two software engineering courses commonly taught in upper level courses. We are developing ClockIt, a tool and supporting methodology that seek to improve student software development practices starting with introductory courses. As an extension or plug-in to an existing integrated development environment (IDE) ClockIt is being designed to monitor and log student development activities. It will also allow estimation of student effort by project or component, and provide reports and visualizations of student "development profiles." We believe that analysis and presentation of development profiles will provide instructors useful visual and quantitative support for teaching sound development practices. The same information will also provide students with immediate feedback with little conceptual overhead