Case Studies for Enhancing Student Engagement and Active Learning in Software V&V Education

Abstract

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.

Research Conversations for Promoting Interdisciplinary Education, Research, and Faculty Collaboration

“…Specifically, they help students develop problem-solving, critical-reasoning, and analytical skills, all of which are valuable tools that prepare students to make better decisions and become better students and, ultimately, better employees. The results from this work has recently been reported in journals 5,15 .…”

“…The work is then disseminated through professional societies like ASEE, Frontiers in Education (FIE) conference sessions or workshops or through campus based workshops 5 . This knowledge transmission model has limited effectiveness because of its one-shot, one-size-fits-all, just-in-case training approach fails to address local difference and needs 6 .…”

Electric dipole moment of the deuteron in the standard model with NN − Λ N − Σ N coupling

“…In our work, we have modeled the N N → Y N interaction by the one meson exchange effect, with the |∆S| = 1 interactions calculated using the vacuum saturation approximation. The glunoic correction to the CP-odd meson-baryon interaction generated by a CP-odd four-quark interaction is typically O(100%) in the large N c analysis [120][121][122]. In the case of |∆S| = 1 processes, however, we have a strange quark which forbids the exchange of quarks between mesons and baryons, reducing higher order gluonic corrections.…”

Using Academia-Industry Partnerships to Enhance Software Verification & Validation Education via Active Learning Tools

“…Raju and Sankar (1999) define Case Study education as providing students with a record of a technical and/or business issue that actually has been faced by managers, together with surrounding facts, opinions, and prejudices upon which management decisions have to depend. In this project, Case Studies are drawn from a wide range of industry SV&V practices and reported in detail elsewhere (Manohar et al, 2015). Students are presented industry standard documents for review to prepare for the tasks.…”