Software engineering as a discipline covers a large spectrum of concepts, from the very detailed technical aspects of system programming, to the high-end abstract concepts of the organizational software processes. Fundamentally, this also indicates that the software engineering researchers can focus their work on any of the several sub-disciplines, but also imposes an identity problem; how do the Master's and Bachelor's level students learn the fundamentals of software engineering, and how should they be taught these aspects? In this study, we observe three implementations of courses focusing on software engineering methods, and identify diferent approaches and recommendations on what works, and how software engineering courses should be constructed to promote student motivation and interest towards the discipline. Based on our observations, the fundamentals should focus more on the small-scale practical applications of the software engineering tools and practices, and promote real-life-applicability, since the students expect applicable experience, and software-industry relevance.
• Social and professional topics → Software engineering education; Model curricula;
Software engineering as a discipline covers a large spectrum of
diferent concepts, from the very detailed technicalities of system
programming, to the highly abstract concepts of software
organizations and their process models [
SWEPHD2018, September 17th, 2018, St. Petersburg, Russia
hand it also promotes an identity problem since the discipline might
not be very clearly defined for the university students [
The ACM curricula for software engineering [
In this paper, we conduct a qualitative case study on three courses
following the general guidelines and recommendations of the ACM
2004 curricula for software engineering, and based on their
feedback, assess the student expectations and general needs of the
software engineering courses in the university-level education. First
one of the case study courses was aimed towards Master’s level
students and heavily applied distance learning approaches,
focusing on the software engineering methods and their application via
software engineering design tools such as the UML2 (for
example [
The results indicate that there are concerns on how the students perceive software engineering as a discipline, and recommendations on what actions should be taken to enable better learning outcomes, and better motivation towards the software engineering as an area of academic interest. Overall, our research questions are How should the fundamental software engineering courses be taught to enable more interest towards the subject? and What are the current areas of interest for the student body in software engineering?.
This paper is also a continuance study which follows our
software engineering research group’s prior case studies on software
engineering and university-level education, for example in the
topics of application of video-based course lectures [
Rest of the paper is constructed as follows: In the Section 2 we discuss the recent research studies with the similar topics and concepts, while in Section 3 the applied research approach is described. Section 4 presents the case study results, while Section 5 provides discussion, observations and implications of these results. The Section 6 closes the paper with the conclusions. 2
The software engineering discipline covers several diferent areas of interest, which makes the development of the course curricula dificult. To address this issue of expectations vs. the course contents, there are some studies which address the preferred methods of approaching the software engineering course contents, and two model curricula which include recommendations for the taught topics.
The most comprehensive model for software engineering
curriculum is the ACM SE curriculum, first published in 2004 and
supplemented with additions on the 2014 edition [
The other more common model for software engineering is the
IEEE Software Engineering Book of Knowledge (SWEBOK) with the
version 3 being the most recent model available [
In the assessment of these models, Alarifi et al. [
On the flip side of the coin, Kuang and Han [
Assessing the feasibility and student motivation towards university
courses is not straightforward, since there might be several
underlying phenomena which might afect the outcomes. To compensate
for these issues, we applied an explanatory case study approach
following the general principles presented by Eisenhardt [
To study the student expectations and the course contents ofered in Software Engineering courses, three implementations of the fundamental software engineering courses delivered by one faculty in one university were selected for in-depth case study. The first course which was selected for the analysis was Bachelor’s level course Fundamentals of software engineering (Course A), arranged in the academic year of 2017-2018, the second course Master’s level course Software Engineering Methods (Course B), from the academic year of 2013-2014 and the third one Fundamentals of Software Testing (Course C), arranged in 2014-2015. The course contents included in all courses included topics such as the common software process models, commonly applied software standards, software design tools -especially UML2-based-, software development environments and an overview of the common software product architectures, with boundary-control-entity-based (BCE) approach on the system module modeling. In all courses, the students were not expected to write algorithms or solve programming-based problems, but were expected to understand source code, and be able to create software engineering-related documents and designs based on the given materials and project repositories.
Combined, these three courses had over two hundred students, representing the diferent study majors from computer science, to industrial engineering and management, and electrical engineering from one university. The Course A was arranged as a traditional university course, with local weekly lectures and exercise events, whereas the Courses B and C were arranged as a long-distanceenabled courses applying course recordings and a separate tutorial video archives. All courses had exercise events which afected the course grade, plus at least one larger project involving teamwork and a mandatory separate exam. These courses and their components are defined in more detail in the Table 1.
From these three case courses, the data analysis on the
expectations and the student considerations towards software engineering
was collected via course feedback, course activity, submitted works,
student-teacher communication and from the completion statistics.
The open feedback and other eligible components were analyzed
following the principles of open coding from the Straussian grounded
theory [
The case courses were organized three years apart, and applied two diferent approaches on the course organization. The Course A was more or less traditional university course with the focus on the face-to-face teaching events with the course contents following a textbook, whereas the Courses B and C were organized as an longdistance-enabled course promoting self-study availability to select your own working hours. In terms of traditional course performance metrics, all of these courses performed very similarly; most of the students who actually started the course -submitted at least one graded exercise or project - completed all of the mandatory tasks, and the course average in all three cases was similarly around the midpoint of the grading scale. Similarly, the feedback indicated that the students felt that the course time consumption and overall dificulty was at an acceptable level. Interestingly, even though the courses were similarly laborious and dificult, the "traditionally organized" Course A had over 1 full grade worse student-given grade (3.0 vs. 4.3/4.1), and from the observed cases, it also was the only one where the amount of negative feedback superseded the positive.
Besides student workload and dificulty, the students also performed on these courses at an acceptable level. The courses B and C had over 75 percent pass rates when considering the students who actually made an efort to participate and pass the course. Similarly, the Course A had over 80 percent of the students eligible for the ifnal grade, provided that they pass the final exam at some point in the future. The general course statistics and the amount of collected feedback is summarized in the Table 2.
In the feedback for the courses, the students were requested to list the topics they were expecting to learn from the course, and how the course contents matched with the student expectations. For example, in the Course C, the students were expecting to learn real-life applicable experiences (59% of the feedback), Management and design of software quality practices (50%), actual testing work techniques (45%) and testing exercises with a real software project and source code (36%). Similarly, the students in Course B ranked the actual exercise events more important than the lectures (grade 3.95 vs. 3.86 on scale 1-5, 5 best), the demo cases more important than the lectures (4.45 vs. 3.86) and both of the project works more important than the lectures (4.45 and 4.23 vs. 3.86). The most important diference between the separately graded course components was between the video lectures and tutorial archive versus the traditional lectures; the video-based approach was considerably more favored than the face-to-face lecturing (4.68 vs. 3.86). Similar observations were also made in both courses A and C; for example in the Course A, the summary video was watched by 35 percent of the students before the first exam, whereas in the last two lectures only less than ten percent of the student population attended.
In all three feedback surveys the students were also asked comments on how they felt concerning the course arrangements and the taught topics. To generally understand how students perceive software engineering, the feedback were analyzed and coded for observations as one dataset, where the diferences between the course topics, and feedback concerning some course components such as the exercise submission systems, were abstracted or ignored.
In general level, there were more students which were interested in the software engineering as a topic, than those who found the topic to be boring or uninteresting (19% vs. 7% of given feedback). The most common feedback theme, which was expressed by 25 percent of the respondents was that they take software engineering courses because they want to learn practical skills, which can be applied in a real-life scenario.
[When asked on why did the student enroll to the course] "The course really seems like it is training us to work in real-life, not just showing things on the theoretical, abstract level." - Student from Course C
"It was nice to find out that the UML tools are not some mystery box, but a set of practical and simple illustrations." -Student from Course B
This sentiment was somewhat similar to the fourth and fifth most common items, "I want to learn about managing software processes" (15% of feedback) which meant that the student was interested in the management aspects of the software projects, and "I want to learn about <tool>" (15%), which means that the student was expecting to learn about some tools, technique or programming language on that course.
[What part would you keep unchanged if you could only select one‘] "The actual software testing work in the exercises." - Student from Course C
"[The UML2 diagrams] are the most useful part of this course." -Student from Course A
Interestingly, the third most commented feature of the case study courses was that the students actually would have preferred projectbased grading over the course exams, and because of that were complaining that the projects do not have enough impact on the course. Some of the comments declared that the project work was very eficient way to learn, and 10% of the feedback actually mentioned this separately.
"I personally found that demo assignments and projects were really good way to learn. -Student from Course B
"The project assignments really explained everything to me. I think we could drop the separate exercises. Or the exam." -Student from Course A
On the negative feedback, it was interesting to observe, that the most commented aspect was not the lack of motivation or lack of interest towards the subject, but that the students considered the course content or applied tools obsolete, or at least old-fashioned. Other common complaint was that the applied textbooks and exercises derived from those course materials were obsolete, or at best borderline cases. This concern was raised by 13 % of the feedback.
"I expected more advanced topics in software engineering like mobile apps engineering or web applications engineering or even consideration about future of software engineering." - Student from Course B
"Usage of better tools to create the diagrams. [Tool 1 name] is not the best idea. Personally, I have found a tool called [Tool 2 name] which is easier, with more functionalities and more stable. -Student from Course B
"Questions straight from the 70’s way of working with software were unnecessary and in no way relevant to anything." -Student from Course A
"Besides being a student, I also work as a developer in [company]. None of the stuf shown here is no longer used, at least in my domain." - Student from Course A
Besides these items, the feedback also frequently mentioned aspects such as that the student expected to be working with a real-life software project (Open source or such) (13%), the course theory-practice-balance was somehow of (7%), or that they lost motivation to some other aspects of the course implementation, such as unclear instructions (9%), dislike of the lectures or lecturing style (6%) or that they simply did not find the topic interesting (7%), usually because they were forced to take the course as a mandatory part to their study program.
"I simply do not find these exercises interesting" -Student from Course C.
Observing the student expectations and the success factors of the software engineering courses based on three implementations of university courses discussing the fundamental topics of software engineering is obviously not enough to declare any new theories or very deep insight, but it does provide insight into the student perspective and provides implications on the possible areas of interest. First of all, the given feedback promotes a number of clear implications for the areas of interest: (1) The students expect practically applicable skills, whether it means new programming languages, development tools or simply experience transferable to real-life scenarios. (2) The preferred way of learning software engineering discipline aims towards project and case exercises, instead of simple programming tasks or theory and examinations. (3) The most problematic area was not the intrinsic motivation or general interest towards the software engineering as a discipline, but the impression that the taught materials were outdated and obsolete, making the learning efort meaningless.
These items more or less are in line with the observations made
by [
Considering the research questions, How should the fundamental
software engineering courses be taught to enable more interest towards
the subject? and What are the current areas of interest for the student
body in software engineering?, the implications of this case study are
clear. The students who are interested towards software engineering
in general, seem to be more interested towards practical work
and applicable experience, with the critical factor being that the
students perceive the course contents to be useful and relevant. The
approach into the teaching methods, long-distance enabled learning
environment nor the course arrangements, are the most relevant
concern if the course contents are seen something less than useful.
Based on our observed cases, the students in general do not require
a cutting edge digital infrastructure, if the materials and presented
course content is sensible and relevant. Similar observations and
considerations have been also identified and presented earlier, for
example by [
However, it should be remembered that the course feedback
was given by 68 (29.8 %) students from the total of 228 course
enrollments, a minority of the entire pool of course participants.
The first impression might be that the feedback was only given
by the most vocal or active participants, but since the feedback
surveys were voluntary and to a varying degree anonymous, a
response rate of 29.8% can be considered acceptable for this type of
usage, similarly as described by Fink [
Software engineering as a discipline covers a vast area of diferent concepts, and from the viewpoint of student, this might cause confusion or identity problems for the software engineering students. Furthermore, the modern student expect certain level of services, which promotes motivation and interest towards the taught topics and concepts. In this paper, we observed three university courses, which all taught diferent fundamental software engineering concepts.
Based on our results, the software engineering students first and foremost expect practically applicable skills and experience, and require that the course materials are up-to-date and modern. A bit surprisingly, the student feedback when comparing online-enabled courses and a traditional lecture-based course, was focused on the relevance of the data, not on the ability to participate long-distance, or work at their own pace and schedules. Besides relevance, the students expect to learn how to manage real-life software projects, and prefer project-based approach over the theory-based lectures.
These results obviously do not form a strong theory or validate any prior works, but like qualitative studies in general, identify and pinpoint potential problems, and provide suggestions or recommendations which should be taken into account in the future works in similar conditions. In our case, the future work would be to modernize certain parts of the Course A analyzed in this study, and observe the changes in the student feedback and considerations. Other approach would be to include more advanced courses into the analysis, and develop a framework or recommendations on how the software engineering course design should be approached, or how the current ACM SE-curricula matches the modern student expectations.
I would like to thank the course participants for their feedback and efort, and acknowledge the support from both Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT) and South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences (XAMK).