Preparing computer science students to question and improve a software development process

Shippensburg University offers a B.S. in Computer Science degree with a concentration in software engineering. In addition to a core of computer science classes, this concentration contains three four credit software engineering courses. The main goal of this concentration is to prepare the students to be able to measure the software development process and enact appropriate modifications. This requires that they must be aware that there are a variety of software process alternatives and when various aspects of each process might be beneficial. In addition, they need to be able to apply appropriate statistical analysis to assess the process. In order to accomplish this, our software engineering concentration includes three software engineering specific courses: traditional lifecycle, testing & extreme programming, and software metrics/project management. In the first two courses, the students work in teams to develop products for customers using two disciplined, but very different, processes (a variation of TSP and XP). By comparing these experiences, the students learn about making the choices that software engineers have to make regularly. In software metrics, we study methods of assessing risks, the process, and modifications to the process. This paper describes these courses and the results of our assessment of these courses.