Software Engineering Education
We have conducted lots of research on software engineering education. Most of the studies have been conducted in our capstone project course where the students carry out real projects for real, often industrial clients. We have studied the encountered problems [1], learning outcomes [2], and the relationship between these aspects [3]. Furthermore, we have studied the differences in scrum usage between high and low performing capstone teams [4], and the customer’s perspective of the capstone project [5].
In [1] we analyzed qualitatively hundreds of encountered problems collected in root-cause-analysis workshops from eleven capstone project teams. Most of the problems seemed to provide important educational opportunities for the students. However, sometimes the problems worsened so much that they had educationally detrimental consequences, and we also tried to come up with some suggestions for mitigating such situations.
We also realized that the root causes were not necessarily related to the lack of certain skills or knowledge but rather to the wrong attitude towards something. This led to a new study, in which we used interviews and surveys to study the capstone project students’ attitude changes regarding the importance and difficulty of various software engineering topics [2]. We found out that there were desired changes.
In [3] we conducted a broad survey to study quantitatively the encountered software engineering problems in the capstone project, and their relationship to the amount of learning on various software engineering topics and to customer satisfaction. The study revealed which are desired problems (positive impact to learning with only a small negative impact to customer satisfaction), and which are undesired (large negative impact to customer satisfaction without much positive impact to learning).
References
- Vanhanen, J., Lehtinen, T.O.A, Software Engineering Problems Encountered by Capstone Project Teams, International Journal of Engineering Education 30(6(A)), pp. 1461-1475, 2014.
- Paasivaara, M. Voda, D., Heikkilä, V.T., Vanhanen, J., Lassenius, C., How does participating in a capstone project with industrial customers affect student attitudes? International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE-SEET) 2018, pp. 49-57, 2018
- Vanhanen, J., Lehtinen, T.O.A, Lassenius, C.: Software engineering problems and their relationship to perceived learning and customer satisfaction on a software capstone project. Journal of Systems and Software Vol. 137, pp. 50-66, 2018.
- Paasivaara, M., Vanhanen, J., Heikkilä, V.T., Lassenius, C., Itkonen, J., Laukkanen, E.I., Do High and Low Performing Student Teams Use Scrum Differently in Capstone Projects? ICSE-SEET 2017: 146-149, 2017.
- Paasivaara, M., Vanhanen, J., Lassenius, C., Collaborating with industrial customers in a capstone project course: the customers’ perspective. International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE-SEET) 2019, pp. 12-22, 2019.