Twenty dirty tricks to train software engineers

Dawson, Ray

doi:10.1145/337180.337204

Cited by 56 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…We concur with Dawson (2000) who strongly advocates that learning through realistic experience with real clients and ill structured problems rather than well defined and carefully planned projects is more beneficial and has been successful over an extended period of time. In a recent survey conducted at The University of Ballarat, 19 out of 20 students answered yes to the statement "It has been great dealing with a real client".…”

Section: Selection 1 Appropriate Projectssupporting

confidence: 67%

“…Authentic and realistic problems are very engaging and, hence, motivating. Designing problems for students to encounter can shape the student experience (see for example : Dawson, 2000;Fleming, 2005, Gehrke et al, 2002. We agree with Garlan, Gluch and Tomayko (1997) that it is important that the student project is not crucial to the client, so students, whilst motivated to produce a product for a real client, are free to learn by making mistakes.…”

Section: Selection 1 Appropriate Projectsmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Projects may cover diverse technical areas, including software development on specialised platforms, hardware design, networking problems, and multimedia development. The students may possess some of the technical knowledge but fall short on experience in the application of software engineering techniques (Dawson, 2000;Gehrke et al, 2002). Some of our students have completed previous study units in project management and have familiarity with project management tools; however this experience has been limited to tasks such as the creation of gantt charts for assignments, rather than using these as live applications in a project of 11 to 24 weeks duration.…”

Section: A Scalable and Portable Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

A Scalable and Portable Structure or Conducting Successful Year-long Undergraduate Software Team Projects

Keogh¹,

Sterling²,

Venables

2007

JITE:Research

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Executive SummaryYear-long team projects with external clients provide a well recognized opportunity for students to gain industry experience, whilst being supported and guided by staff to minimize risks. Each group should be supervised to ensure that they have enough direction and confidence to approach a new problem of significant size, without being daunted. A structure is needed that is flexible and adaptable to suit various institutional cultures but, at the same time, provides the safety net to ensure that success is likely. This paper presents a reflective analysis of teaching at three different institutions and presents the resulting distilled wisdom of experience that has produced a structured framework for capstone project units.The proposed structure is scalable to any class size and portable across institutions and potentially across technical disciplines. The structure leads to team student projects that are successfully engaging and provide excellent experience toward producing work-ready graduates. The structure is flexible in design so that the teaching workload does not increase too much as class sizes increase, but students are still well supported with appropriate scaffolding and mentoring.We detail the key factors in our framework: careful project selection, appropriate sign posts, and helpful guides that together improve upon overall project success. We argue that students need appropriate projects, 'good' clients, and a well formed team. The sign posts support students through the 'uncharted waters' of ill-defined problem-based learning. Sign posts include: deliverables, deadlines, team notebook, progress reports, and accountable time-tracking. Helpful guides spread the teaching workload broadly: relying on cultural expectations, technology, team supervisor, feedback, and clear marking guidelines.This structure has been successfully implemented in at least three different universities in Australia and several remote partner teaching sites in different countries over many years. We have provided case study examples of implementations in three different Australian UniMaterial published as part of this publication, either on-line or in print, is copyrighted by the Informing Science Institute. Permission to make digital or paper copy of part or all of these works for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage AND that copies 1) bear this notice in full and 2) give the full citation on the first page. It is permissible to abstract these works so long as credit is given. To copy in all other cases or to republish or to post on a server or to redistribute to lists requires specific permission and payment of a fee. Contact Publisher@InformingScience.org to request redistribution permission. Structure for Conducting Successful Software Team Projects 516versities: a large urban university (The University of Melbourne), a small urban university (Victoria University) and a regional university (The University o...

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Section: Selection 1 Appropriate Projectssupporting

confidence: 67%

Section: Selection 1 Appropriate Projectsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: A Scalable and Portable Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

A Scalable and Portable Structure or Conducting Successful Year-long Undergraduate Software Team Projects

Keogh¹,

Sterling²,

Venables

2007

JITE:Research

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“…In the real world, ambiguous or scanty specifications, are one of the most likely of scenarios to be encountered by software engineers (Dawson, 2000). The programmer cannot expect to emulate a ready-made solution, or the development environment, or even know the language syntax already.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Become a Star: Teaching the Process of Design and Implementation of an Intelligent System

Venables

Tan

2005

JITE:Research

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Teaching future knowledge engineers, the necessary skills for designing and implementing intelligent software solutions required by business, industry and research today, is a very tall order. These skills are not easily taught in traditional undergraduate computer science lectures; nor are the practical experiences easily reinforced in laboratory sessions. In an attempt to address this issue, a software development project, designed to take students through a complete process of knowledge engineering, was introduced in an undergraduate Intelligent Systems subject. In this project, students were required to act as domain experts, knowledge engineers, programmers, end users and project manager in the production of a game-playing expert system. The paper describes the project, its objectives and development, as well as some of the benefits.

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“…The need for preparing computer science students to the "real world" software engineering problems has already been recognized and is addressed by introducing practical projects and teamwork as a regular part of software engineering courses [8,9,11,12,13,19]. To our knowledge however, teaching distributed software development at university is very rare, and is restricted either to existing software engineering courses [3] or to case studies and student projects [2].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%