Title :
Using continuous integration of code and content to teach software engineering with limited resources
Author :
Sus, J.G. ; Billingsley, William
Author_Institution :
Sch. of ITEE, Univ. of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
Abstract :
Previous courses addressing the gap between student and professional programming practice have either isolated small groups´ development in such a way that larger scale difficulties that motivate many professional practices do not arise, or have required significant additional staffing that would be expensive to provide in a large cohort core undergraduate software engineering course. We describe the first iteration of a course that enabled 73 students to work together to improve a large common legacy code base using professional practices and tools, staffed only by two lecturers and two undergraduate students employed as part-time tutors. The course relies on continuous integration and automated metrics, that coalesce frequently updated information in a manner that is visible to students and can be monitored by a small number of staff. The course is supported by a just-in-time teaching programme of thirty-two technical topics. We describe the constraints that determined the design of the course, and quantitative and qualitative data from the first iteration of the course.
Keywords :
computer science education; educational courses; software engineering; teaching; automated metrics; code continuous integration; course design; just-in-time teaching programme; legacy code; limited resources; qualitative data; quantitative data; software engineering teaching; undergraduate software engineering course; Educational institutions; Programming profession; Robots; Software; Software engineering; Continuous Integration; Experience Report; Resource Constraints; Software Engineering; Studio Course;
Conference_Titel :
Software Engineering (ICSE), 2012 34th International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Zurich
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4673-1066-6
Electronic_ISBN :
0270-5257
DOI :
10.1109/ICSE.2012.6227025