Process activities in a project based course in software engineering

"Studio in Software Engineering" is a curriculum component for the undergraduate-level software engineering program at Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal. The main teaching objective is to develop in students a professional attitude towards producing high quality software. The course is based on a project approach in a collaborative learning environment. The software development process used is based on the Unified Process for EDUcation, which is customized from the Rational Unified Process. An insight into the dynamics of three teams involved in the development of the same project allows us to present and interpret data concerning the effort spent by students during particular process activities. The contribution of this paper is to illustrate an approach involving qualitative analysis of the effort spent by the students on each software process activity. Such an approach may allow the development of a model that would lead to effort prediction within a software process in order to designate the actions for improving academic projects.