Experiences teaching software engineering for the first time

ABSTRACT

This paper presents an approach to teaching a Software Engineering course, as well as significant feedback from the students who were enrolled in the first offering of the course using this approach. The course provided students with conceptual material as well as experience with a large project. Just teaching concepts or major topics, while important, is not sufficient; students need hands-on exposure to doing a large project in order to comprehend the complexity of building real systems. On the other hand a course cannot "teach" only a project because students need a conceptual framework, approaches, and techniques upon which to base the complexities of software engineering. The feedback from the students who took the first offering of the course provides useful information to anyone who teaches Software Engineering, in addition to instructors preparing to teach the subject for the first time.

REFERENCES

• 1: Tom Gilb , Dorothy Graham , Susannah Finzi, Software Inspection, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1993
• 2: Shari Lawrence Pfleeger, Software engineering: theory and practice, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1998
• 3: R.J. J. Pooley , Perdita Stevens, Using UML: Software Engineering with Objects and Rules, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1999
• 4: Stephen R. Schach, Classical and Object-Oriented Software Engineering with Uml and C++, McGraw-Hill Pub. Co., 1998

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.3 COMPUTERS AND EDUCATION

General Terms:
Documentation, Human Factors