Improving the quality of software engineering education: Benefits and disadvantages of working processes

In this paper, we compare two interrelated, process-centered courses in software engineering at the curriculum interface between Bachelor’s and Master’s degree. Our goal is to find out what benefits and disadvantages emerge regarding education and what could be improved. The first of these one-semester courses (Bachelor level) makes students familiar with a software engineering project using teamwork while the latter (Master level) builds on this achieved experience and focuses on personal process improvement. Thus, these courses use different methods to achieve the objectives. We conducted a postmortem analysis from both courses. We also integrated the results of our earlier, independent studies on software engineering projects into this analysis. For the analysis, we used a quantiqualitative approach. We started by analysing working-hour metrics and grading information quantitatively. After that, we conducted a qualitative analysis on the documents to fill in the gaps, and the separated studies. The comparison revealed anticipations as expected but also striking, interesting issues as well. It was evident that teamwork leads to good planning, probably because all information needs to be communicated to other members. On the other hand, we noted that prior work experience in software development does not correlate positively with process effectiveness, rather vice versa: those students who were eager to report their high work experience, were less capable of developing their personal work process. In addition, notable differences in working methods exist between these two courses. Moreover, the yield value (hours per credits) differed notably. The percentage of work hours per work phase on average also varied substantially between the courses. In the sense of improving software engineering education, we found that the ways in which students met the objectives and experienced the processes were important. We will discuss the results and educational improvements below.