Yvonne Sedelmaier

Software engineering body of skills (SWEBOS)

The development of complex software systems requires a mixture of various technical and non-technical competencies. While there are some guidelines what technical knowledge is required to make a good software engineer, there is a lack of insight as to which non-technical or soft skills are required to master complex software projects. This paper proposes a body of skills (SWEBOS) for software engineering. The collection of necessary skills is developed on the basis of a clear, data-driven research design. The resulting required soft skills for software engineering are described precisely and semantically rich in a three-level structure. This approach guarantees that skills are not just characterized in a broad and general manner, but rather they are specifically adapted to the domain of software engineering.

Learning and teaching software process models

Software process models are fairly abstract tools for organizing large, complex software development projects. Since particularly undergraduate students commonly do not have any experience in being part of such a project, their understanding of the benefits and shortcomings of particular process models is very limited. Even more, frequently they are not aware of the need to follow a particular process model since their previous one-person software assignments were too small for requiring any such model at all.

Using business process models to foster competencies in requirements engineering

Requirements are of paramount importance for the quality of software systems. For various reasons, however, university students encounter difficulties in understanding the role of requirements and appropriately applying relevant methods to deal with requirements. This paper describes the concept for teaching requirements engineering that was devised at Coburg University of Applied Sciences. As a key idea, teaching requirements starts out from business process models. From these models, requirements for a workflow application can be derived and specified in a requirements document. A main benefit of this approach lies in the fact that requirements are not just presented as an abstract concept. Furthermore, students are exposed to the complexity of an almost realistic workflow application. Being more realistic than a toy project, the latter also improves understanding why requirements should be described precisely and provides opportunities to also exercise non-technical competencies that are important for successful requirements engineering.

Active and inductive learning in software engineering education

If software engineering education is done in a traditional lecture-oriented style students have no other choice than believing that the solutions they are told actually work for a problem that they never encountered themselves. In order to overcome this problem, this paper describes an approach which allows students to better understand why software engineering and several of its core methods and techniques are needed, thus preparing them better for their professional life. This approach builds on active and inductive learning. Exercises that make students actively discover relevant software engineering issues are described in detail together with their pedagogical underpinning.

A multi-perspective framework for evaluating software engineering education by assessing students' competencies: SECAT — A software engineering competency assessment tool

Education invariably aims at developing competencies, technical as well as non-technical ones. As a consequence, there is also a need for methods that can be used to assess the quality of education faithfully. One possible approach is an assessment of whether intended learning outcomes are achieved, i.e. an investigation if the target audience possesses the desired competencies. Assessment of competencies, however, is tricky since competencies are often only vaguely defined. This paper presents SECAT, an approach to assess competencies, and particularly those needed for proper software engineering. To that end, SECAT builds on Rauners approach for competency assessment in vocational education. Rauners approach uses nine competency criteria, which are further refined by suitable issues that indicate to which extent a competency is, or should be, present. The main contribution of this paper lies in the adaptation and enhancement of this framework in order to make it useable in software engineering education. Adaptation and enhancements encompass issues such as team and individual assessments, integration of multiple perspectives from various groups of stakeholders, and product- and process-orientation. The paper also presents first insights from using SECAT in a pilot university course in software engineering.

Evaluating didactical approaches based upon students' competences

In recent years, teaching and learning shifted towards competence-oriented approaches. As a consequence, examinations as well as didactical approaches need to become competence-oriented. Unfortunately, competence-oriented examinations and assessments of the efficacy of didactical approaches are fairly hard - currently, no generally accepted approaches for competence-oriented evaluation are available. To make things worse, software engineering is a complex subject matter. Therefore, intended learning outcomes in software engineering education also tend to be quite complex and vary widely with a courses context. This paper provides details on how SECAT, a Software Engineering Competence Assessment Tool, is used to assess the efficacy of didactical approaches in software engineering education in a competence-oriented matter. To that end, SECAT needs to be adapted to the specific context, namely a particular didactical approach with its associated intended learning outcomes. Intended learning outcomes are related to specific competences, including non-technical skills. The paper presents results from applying SECAT for assessing the efficacy of employed didactical approaches in several software engineering courses. Furthermore, the paper shows an example of how SECATs assessment results are used to improve didactical approaches for upcoming instances of these courses. SECAT and its underlying methodology is one step forward in competence assessment in software engineering.

Towards a better understanding of learning mechanisms in information systems education

Instructors not only in higher education are regularly faced with the problem that they need to develop a new course, or to adapt an existing one to changed requirements. This is especially true for topics related to information technology (IT) since technological progress is fast in this domain. However, instructors are not prepared really well for this task since they typically have a professional and educational background in areas different from pedagogy. Therefore, some sort of methodological framework to support the systematic development and refinement of courses would be highly appreciated. This paper presents such a method, called Competence- Oriented Didactics. This approach builds upon several concepts from general didactics, most notably Klafkis Didactic Analysis, and combines and extends these concepts. As a proof of concept, the method is applied to the refinement of an introductory course on information systems. This case study shows, among other things, that Competence-Oriented Didactics has the potential to be applicable for course (re-)design in other domains beyond IT as well.

A new approach to collaborative learning in software engineering focussed on embedded systems

Software Engineering is a very complex and abstract process and therefore hard to learn and hard to teach. Especially in mechatronics software engineering is not the main focus of the university studies. Therefore students have little understanding and low motivation to spend time on it. In this paper, we share some experiences on how we tried to give students a deeper understanding for software engineering, its processes and the complexity of software engineering projects. To that end, we chose a new didactical approach consisting of direct instruction and activating learning styles in parallel. The classical lectures were supplemented by a seminar and a project phase to allow students to apply their theoretical learned knowledge without delay in realistic settings. We combined active and passive learning styles to give students the opportunity to consolidate factual knowledge, foster soft skills (e.g. presentation and communication skills), improve team work and gain a deeper understanding of software engineering processes. The experiences of our courses in summer semesters 2010 and 2012 lead to a further development of our didactical approach in 2013. As a consequence, we tried further methods to spread needed information across the student working groups by using a wiki-system, a market of knowledge or mixing the groups between seminar and project phase. At the end of the seminar phase quality gates were implemented and also awards at the end of the project phase. Systematically evaluations at the end of the seminar phase and at the end of the project work show the learning outcomes and possible further improvements of our didactical approach.

A research agenda for identifying and developing required competencies in software engineering

Various issues make learning and teaching software engineering a challenge for both students and instructors. Since there are no standard curricula and no cookbook recipes for successful software engineering, it is fairly hard to figure out which specific topics and competencies should be learned or acquired by a particular group of students. Furthermore, it is not clear which particular didactic approaches might work well for a specific topic and a particular group of students. This contribution presents a research agenda that aims at identifying relevant competencies and environmental constraints as well as their effect on learning and teaching software engineering. To that end, an experimental approach will be taken. As a distinctive feature, this approach iteratively introduces additional or modified didactical methods into existing courses and carefully evaluates their appropriateness. Thus, it continuously improves these methods.

How can we find out what makes a good requirements engineer in the age of digitalization

Good requirements are commonly viewed as a key success factor for IT (and non-IT) projects, but still there seems to be insufficient insight into which competences requirements engineers need to have these days. Digitalization is likely to pose new challenges to requirements engineering. Chances are that digitalization will change the competences that are necessary for successful requirements engineering. This paper proposes a research design that will be used for clarifying which competences requirements engineers need nowadays and how these competences change due to digitalization. To that end, qualitative and quantitative research methods will be combined for developing a comprehensive competence profile for requirements engineering on a scientific basis. The resulting competence profile constitutes a starting point for devising competence-oriented learning settings. Thus, our research contributes to a better understanding of competences for requirements engineering and improves education of future requirements engineers, in particular for coping with challenges posed by digitalization.