Educating students in value-based design and development

Summary form only given. Much of software engineering is taught and practiced in a value-neutral context, in which every requirement, use case, object, test case, and defect is equally important. Too often, students learn that some of their stakeholders\´ value considerations are more important than others by failing to consider this on the job and suffering the consequences. The recent book, Value-Based Software Engineering (S. Biffl et al., eds., Springer, 2005) sets out the agenda of the value-based software engineering community. It is to integrate value considerations into traditional software engineering principles and practices for use in software engineers\´ education and daily work. We have been pursuing this agenda in a research project called "A Value-Based Science of Design", within the NSF Science of Design program. This paper addresses the nature of "value" in a software engineering context; present an initial theory and process for performing value-based software engineering; present example value-based techniques for requirements engineering, design, development, and test; and discuss experiences in incorporating value-based software engineering in individual-assignment and team project courses.