Delivering PSP course in tertiary education environment: Challenges and solution

Abstract

Nowadays, many universities include Personal Software Process (PSP) into their software engineering curriculum. However, delivering PSP course in tertiary education environment always faces at least two challenges. Firstly, in a typical PSP course in education environment, one teacher may teach much more students than a typical PSP class in industry, hence it is extremely difficult to provide evaluation of students' assignments in time. Secondly, participation of students in university often has significantly different characteristics compared to those trainees who had industry experiences.Based on education practice in Software Institute of Nanjing University, this paper proposed an approach to teaching PSP in tertiary education environment with higher efficiency and effectiveness. In this approach, a complete PSP course is delivered and cooperative learning (in pair) is encouraged. Besides, an evaluation team is established to provide timely evaluation on students' submissions and to help students correct their development behaviors. To validate this teaching approach, we conducted an experiment which involved all the freshman students enrolled in software engineering. We compared some process data collected from the submissions of both groups (individual and pair) of students. The results of the experiment show that the load of students' submissions reduced by half while students' interest of learning increased.

Improving PSP education by pairing: An empirical study

“…However, the success of PSP education in academic environments needs carefully-crafted approaches to tackle the challenges, such as large class size and students' involvement. This paper, on the top of our prior experiment reported in [3], proposes an improved approach to adapting typical practices of Pair Programming (PP) into PSP education. This approach aims to significantly relieve the workload on assignment evaluation, to increase the quality of students' work products and their involvement, as well as to improve the education effects.…”

“…3) Data Collection and Analysis: In EXP2010, we have discovered that paired students performed better than solo students in terms of their on-time submission rate of assignment and number of inconsistent items [3]. The former measure supports that paired students show higher involvement than solo students, while the latter indicates that paired students are able to follow PSP process discipline better than solo students.…”

“…Basically, EXP2011 followed the education approach described in Section III and the design of EXP2010 [3]. However, as EXP2010 contains several flaws and issues which may impede the effect of PSP education and affect the experiment results, in EXP2011 we made the several improvements to carry out a more rigorous and formal experiments.…”

“…With reference to the reported experiences and empirical studies, in 2010 summer school, we conducted an initial experiment by introducing some PP practices, e.g., forming pairs for assignments, into PSP course and arranged some students finish the PSP assignments in pairs. We compared the assignment results from both paired students and solo students, which indicated that learning PSP in pairs can reduce the amount of homework without sacrificing the effect and quality of PSP education [3].…”

“…However, delivering PSP course in China often faces a big challenges resulted by the rapidly increasing demand for skilled software engineers due to the fast growth of IT industry. Based on an experiment conducted at Nanjing University in 2010 [3], two major challenges for PSP course in education environment were discovered: the size of class and students' participation and motivation, and it is also suggested in [3] that introducing several practices of Pair Programming (PP) to PSP course may tackle these challenges. The results of our experiment conducted in 2010 (EXP2010) indicated that the performance of paired students in assignments are significantly better than those solo students.…”