Using an issue-based model in a team-based software engineering course

Abstract

Communication in software engineering projects becomes a bottleneck as the number of participants increases. As today's software systems grow in complexity and size, teaching effective communication skills in software engineering courses becomes a critical issue. This paper is an experience report on the use of a issue-based model for teaching meeting procedures in a team-based software engineering project course (7 teams, 25 students). We observed that, when carefully introduced in the classroom, the use of an issue-based model provided significant benefits, even with such limited tool support as a word processor template. More specifically, we observed that students conducted meetings more efficiently, that they maintained a more complete record of the issues under discussion, and that intra-team communication was significantly improved l OverviewOur educational focus has been to provide students with a realistic software engineering experience. We have done this by immersing students in a single, team-based, system design project targeted to build and deliver a complex software system for a real client We observed that, given the distributed nature of the course, a significant number of decisions are made and communicated during weekly team meetings. Although these meeting procedures address part of the problem of capturing and rapidly propagating information, we have also observed that it has several serious shortfalls. First, there is a wide variance in the quality of the meeting process (e.g. communication bandwidth, number of decisions) and the quality of their record (e.g. readable minutes, action items). Second, the chronological and free style of minutes makes it difficult to extract specific issues and decisions for participants not attending the meeting. Generally, the lack of information structuring makes browsing and searching information through minutes difficult.

Communication metrics for software development

“…• Emphasizing requirements early in the project reduces the number of integration problems. We previously reported on the case studies as single project studies using qualitative observations and results from a participants survey and preliminary data [5,7,9]. In this paper, we treat these projects as a multiproject variation study across a set of teams [3] using validated metrics data on the Bboard traffic.…”

A survey of issue resolution on the incremental refinement of the system scope in web system development

“…An issue based approach and method, IBIS (Issue Based Information System) is widely discussed by Kunz and Rittel [8] and several other approaches were later developed as an extension to IBIS. IBIS is a method and an issue-based model for capturing design rationale on large, complex, design problems The models and tools that are derived and extended from the IBIS model are IWEB [3], HyperIBIS [7], gIBIS) [2], rIBIS and REMAP [2]. Among these, only IWEB offers a resolution approach, albeit conceptually.…”

Industrial Experience Projects: A Balance of Process and Product

“…Usually this is satisfactory but some groups need to be shown by example. Dutoit et al (1996) discuss the use of predefined templates for the students to use; we keep a library of past project documentation which the students are allowed to emulate. Outright copying is not a problem as all the projects are different.…”