Revisiting Polya´s approach to foster problem solving skill development in software engineers

A cardinal responsibility of a software engineer is to analyze a given problem and through semantic mapping, apply apropos techniques and constructs to develop viable software solutions. The dominant curriculum models for software engineers has focused on the solution space´s declarative knowledge and has mostly relegated problem solving skills to that of a consequence of the primary educational process. In this paper we present a constructivist aware strategy to amend software engineering curricula by integrating problem solving skill development. To build this approach we examined mathematician Gyorgy Polya´s heuristic of a generalized problem solving model in the context of software engineering (SE) and propose the necessary augmentation to support skill development. We take the position that Polya´s approach may not only functionally address well defined problems encountered at an introductory level but is expandable to tackle ill-structured or wicked problems inherent in the design of complex systems. We present a controlled classroom study which investigates the utility of the proposed methodology to address a set of welldefined problems in a small representative student sampling. Our results show a significant reduction in time to solution given classroom support.