Effective teaching requires effective teaching tools. This pedagogical requirement is especially important for software engineering education, where graduates are expected to develop software that meets rigorous quality standards in functional and application domains. To enhance students' understanding of the needs of the professional software industry, lecture notes are supplanted by additional pedagogical tools being developed at the author's institution for a software verification and validation (V&V) course. These active learning teaching tools, consisting of class exercises, case studies, and case study videos, are being developed in partnership with industry. The basic objective of the project is to improve software education so that it is aligned with both academic research and industry best practices. This project is being funded through a NSF-TUES grant.Through this project in addition to enhancing twenty (20) delivery hours of lecture slides, eighteen (18) delivery hours of case studies, sixteen (16) delivery hours of exercises, and six (6) delivery hours of case study videos totaling sixty (60) delivery hours of Software V&V course modules are being created. In the spring of 2014, diverse case studies were delivered to Software Engineering juniors at the author's institution and their learning outcomes were tracked using a survey instrument. The results showed that the students were able to better comprehend V&V topics such as requirements engineering, reviews and inspections, configuration management, and testing. The knowledge disseminated through lectures seemed to be reinforced by the case studies. In the spring of 2015, additional course materials that include exercises and role-play videos are expected to be created and delivered. The results of this research work will be shared during the poster presentation at ASEE. As part of the project dissemination plan, the teaching materials will be made available to interested institutions and professional organizations. An invitation-only workshop is also planned for August 2015 to share developed course materials and delivery mechanisms.

Two critical problems facing the software (S/W) industry today are the lack of appreciation of the full benefits that can be derived from Software Verification and Validation (V&V) and an associated problem of shortage of adequately trained V&V practitioners. To address this situation, the software V&V course curriculum at the author's institution is being improved via a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded project. The basic objectives of this project are to enhance the quality of software education via increased student engagement and by bridging the gap between the basic principles discussed in the classroom and the complexity of real world problems. The teaching method utilized promotes higher levels of student engagement and learning through interactive, hands-on exercises, case studies and discussions. In addition, the instructional materials were purposefully designed not only for university classroom settings, but to also be deployed for on-the-job professional training in S/W industry settings, thereby helping to increase the pool of professionals with contemporary V&V knowledge and skills.The new course curriculum enhancement described in this paper is guided by academic research and industry best practices that focus on four specific V&V focus areas: requirements engineering, reviews, configuration management, and testing. Among many educational tools that are being developed to achieve the project objectives, the work related specifically to the development of one central component, case studies, is described here. Historically, case studies have been educational tools utilized in business, law, and medicine, but are not as prominent in software engineering. The hypothesis is that case studies would be effective educational tools to introduce real-world professional practices into the classroom, which would help the students in both identifying and solving problems, and developing a perspective on applying knowledge. In this paper we describe a set of V&V related case-studies that we have drawn from industry experiences and developed as pedagogical tools. These case-studies cover several important topics in the S/W V&V domain such as software testing, legal issues in software, software consumer protection, and requirements from the customers' perspectives. We also report on the results of initial implementation of the case studies related to software testing in the classroom and show their effectiveness both in terms of satisfying Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) outcomes assessment and student satisfaction.

Stein Brunvand is an Associate Professor in the College of Education, Health, and Human Services at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. He earned his PhD in Learning Technologies at the University of Michigan. Prior to that, he taught elementary school for six years. Stein is interested in the enhancement of learning environments through the integration of technology and enjoys working with preservice and practicing teachers to learn about how this can be done more effectively. He has conducted research on the impact of research-based professional development on the integration of technology in K-12 classrooms and explored the use of e-portfolios in teaching and learning with undergraduate and graduate students. Dr. Marouane Kessentini, University of Michigan-DearbornDr. Marouane Kessentini is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Michigan Dearborn. He is the founder of the Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE) research lab. He has several collaborations with different industrial companies on the use computational search, machine learning and evolutionary algorithms to address several software engineering problems such as software quality, software testing, software migration, software evolution, etc. He received his Phd from University of Montreal in 2012 and a Presidential BSc Award from the President of Tunisia in 2007. He received many grants from both industry and federal agencies and published around 75 papers in search-based software engineering journals and conferences, including 3 best paper awards. He has served as program committee member in several major conferences (GECCO, MODELS, ICMT, SSBSE, etc.), an editorial board member of several journals (SQJ, ASE, IST, TEVC and EMSE), and an organization member of many conferences and workshops. He was also the co-chair of the SBSE track at the GECCO2014 and GECCO2015 conferences and he is now the general chair of of the 8th IEEE Search Based Software Engineering Symposium (SSBSE2016). He is also the founder of the North American Symposium on Search Based Software Engineering, funded by the National Science WIP: Introducing Active Learning in a Software Engineering Course AbstractThis paper describes the authors' experiences introducing active learning opportunities in junior level software engineering courses. The project team critically examined existing software engineering courses at our institutions and created new active learning style instructional materials for selected course topics. We devised delivery strategies that incorporated academic research findings and industry best practices. Based on our assessment data, we believe that students participating in the activities created for our courses are better equipped with fundamental theoretical knowledge and invaluable hands-on experiences that can measurably increase their ability to contribute to the software industry.

Abstract:One of the critical problems facing software industry today is the lack of appreciation of the full benefits that can be derived from Software Verification and Validation (V&V) and an associated problem of shortage of adequately trained V&V practitioners. To address this situation, software V&V course curriculum is being improved at author's institution via a NSF-funded project. The basic objectives of this project are to improve software education to make it well aligned with academic research as well as industry best practices. In addition, it is aimed that the course material could also be used to enhance on-the-job professional training in SW industry settings, thereby helping to increase the pool of professionals with contemporary V&V knowledge and skills.The new course curriculum enhancement described in this paper is guided by academic research and industry best practices that focus on four specific V&V focus areas: requirements engineering, reviews, configuration management, and testing. Among many educational tools that are being developed to achieve project objectives, the work related to the development of case studies is described here. Historically, case studies have been as educational tools in business, law and medicine but not so much in software engineering. The hypothesis is that case studies would be effective educational tools to introduce real-world professional practices into the classroom which would help the students in identifying and solving problems, and develop a perspective on knowledge application. In this paper we describe a set of V&V related casestudies that we have drawn from industry experiences and developed them as pedagogical tools. These case-studies cover several important topics in S/W V&V domain such as software testing, legal issues in software, software consumer protection, and requirements from the customers' perspectives. We will also report on the results of initial implementation of case studies related to software testing in the classroom.

Acharya joined Robert Morris University in Spring 2005 after serving 15 years in the Software Industry. His teaching involvement and research interest are in the area of Software Engineering education, Software Verification & Validation, Data Mining, Neural Networks, and Enterprise Resource Planning. He also has interest in Learning Objectives based Education Material Design and Development. Acharya is a co-author of "Discrete Mathematics Applications for Information Systems Professionals-2nd Ed., Prentice Hall". He is a member of Nepal Engineering Association and is also a member of ASEE, and ACM. Acharya was the Principal Investigator of the 2007 HP grant for Higher Education at RMU. In 2013 Acharya received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant for developing course materials through an industry-academia partnership in the area of Software Verification and Validation.