Towards an Ability Model for Software Engineering Apprenticeship

Abstract

Despite recent efforts to improve the effectiveness of software engineering education, most approaches do not equip students with non-technical skills and fail to be practice-oriented. Brest University provides the software engineering by immersion paradigm as an alternative to other education systems. Shifting to the constructivism paradigm as far as possible, this education system is entirely based on a 7-month project, performed by a 6-students team within a virtual company and tutored by an experienced software engineer.The ISO/IEC 12207 standard is a reference framework of software engineering processes. This standard provides the basis of our reference decomposition into processes/activities/tasks and apprenticeship scenes. Issued from professional didactics, the analysis of activity distinguishes two kind of activity: productive and constructive. The former is work-oriented while the latter helps the actor to improve his/her own practice. Hence, constructive activity is apprenticeship and personal development. Analysing apprenticeship scenes provides an ability model of our immersion system. The model is defined in terms of its constituent competencies areas, each of which is further defined in terms of its constituent competencies families; a family corresponding to an activity of the reference decomposition. Each family is associated with a set of cohesive abilities.The ability model establishes a structure that directly supports the personal and team construction process of the knowledge and skills required to practice engineering of a software project. Each student periodically fills this structure while auto-analysing the tasks performed and him/her achievement level with the abilities defined in the model. This periodic inventory is supported by eCompas, a tool intended to manage development, assessment and value-added of competencies over the course of a curriculum or a professional career.

Relating Student, Teacher and Third-Party Assessments in a Bachelor Capstone Project

“…Each family is made of a set of knowledge and abilities (mapping to base practices), called competencies; each of these entities is represented by a designation and a description. The ability model and its associated tool eCompas have been presented in [14].…”

Does Process Assessment Drive Process Learning? The Case of a Bachelor Capstone Project

“…Each family is made of a set of knowledge and abilities (mapping to base practices), eventually called competencies; each of these entities being represented by a designation and a detailed description. The ability model and its associated tool eCompas has been presented in [3].…”

Development of Dynamic Coupling Measurement of Distributed Object Oriented Software Based on Trace Events

“…Dynamic metrics can be used as improving agents for static metrics by extracting the real time behavior of a software at runtime and taking the appropriate steps (such as eliminating a class that is never used at runtime). After the required changes made in the design phase, value of the static metric can be checked against a threshold value to decide whether there is a further need of dynamic analysis or not [29].…”