research-article

Three years of design-based research to reform a software engineering curriculum

Authors:

Matti Luukkainen,

Arto Vihavainen,

Thomas VikbergAuthors Info & Claims

SIGITE '12: Proceedings of the 13th annual conference on Information technology education

Pages 209 - 214

https://doi.org/10.1145/2380552.2380613

Published: 11 October 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Most of the research-oriented computer science departments provide software engineering education. Providing up-to-date software engineering education can be problematic, as practises used in modern software development companies have been developed in the industry and as such do not often reach teachers in university contexts. The danger, and often the unfortunate reality, is that institutions giving education in software engineering end up teaching the subject using outdated practices with technologies no longer in use. In this article we describe a three-year design-based research where the goal has been to design and reform a software engineering subtrack within our bachelor curriculum that would make it possible for the students to have strong up-to-date theoretical and practical skills in software engineering without a need to remove any of the existing theoretical aspects.

References

[1]

P. Abrahamsson. Inaugural lecture: The new era of software quality (in Finnish). http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/kolumni/ohjelmistojen-laadun-uusi-aikakausi, December 2009.

[2]

P. Abrahamsson, P. Kettunen, and F. Fagerholm. The set-up of a valuable software engineering research infrastructure of the 2010s. In Workshop on Valuable Software Products, 2010.

Digital Library

[3]

A. Abram, J. W. More, B. Pierre, and D. Robert, editors. Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knownledge. IEEE Computer Society, 2004.

[4]

D. Alur, D. Malkis, and J. Crupi. Core J2EE Patterns: Best Practices and Design Strategies. Prentice Hall, 2 edition, 2003.

Digital Library

[5]

S. W. Ambler and R. Jeffries. Agile Modeling: Effective Practices for Extreme Programming and the Unified Process. Wiley, 2002.

Digital Library

[6]

K. Beck. Test Driven Development: By Example. Addison-Wesley, 2002.

Digital Library

[7]

K. Beck and C. Andres. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change (2nd Edition). Addison-Wesley Professional, 2004.

Digital Library

[8]

K. Beck, M. Beedle, A. van Bennekum, A. Cockburn, W. Cunningham, M. Fowler, J. Grenning, J. Highsmith, A. Hunt, R. Jeffries, J. Kern, B. Marick, R. C. Martin, S. Mallor, K. Shwaber, and J. Sutherland. The Agile Manifesto. Technical report, The Agile Alliance, 2001.

[9]

A. Begel and B. Simon. Struggles of new college graduates in their first software development job. In Proceedings of the SIGCSE '08. ACM, 2008.

Digital Library

[10]

P. Bell. On the theoretical breadth of design-based research in education. Educational Psychologist, 39(4), 2004.

[11]

C. Bereiter. Design research for sustained innovation. Cognitive Studies Bulletin of the Japanese Cognitive Science Society, 9(3):321--327, 2002.

[12]

A. L. Brown. Design experiments: Theoretical and methodological challenges in creating complex interventions in classroom settings. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 2(2):141--178, 1992.

[13]

H. Burkhardt and A. H. Schoenfeld. Improving educational research: Toward a more useful, more influential, and better-funded enterprise. Educational Researcher, 32(9):3--14, 2003.

[14]

M. E. Caspersen and J. Bennedsen. Instructional design of a programming course: a learning theoretic approach. In ICER '07: Proc. of the 3rd international workshop on Computing education research, 2007.

Digital Library

[15]

D. Chelimsky, D. Astels, B. Helmkamp, D. North, Z. Dennis, and A. Hellesoy. The RSpec Book. Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2010.

[16]

P. Cobb, J. Confrey, A. diSessa, R. Lehrer, and L. Schauble. Design experiments in educational research. Educational Researcher, 32(1):9--13, 2003.

[17]

M. Cohn. Agile Estimating and Planning. Prentice Hall, 2005.

Digital Library

[18]

A. Collins, J. Brown, and A. Holum. Cognitive apprenticeship: Making thinking visible. American Educator, 15(3):6--46, 1991.

[19]

A. Collins, J. Brown, and S. Newman. Cognitive apprenticeship: Teaching the crafts of reading, writing, and mathematics. In L. Resnick, editor, Knowing learning and instruction Essays in honor of Robert Glaser, volume Knowing, l of Psychology of Education and Instruction Series, pages 453--494. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1989.

[20]

Devops: A software revolution in the making? Cutter IT Journal, 24(8), 2011. Special issue.

[21]

P. Duval, S. Matyas, and A. Glower. Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk. Addison-Wesley, 2007.

Digital Library

[22]

D. C. Edelson. Design research: What we learn when we engage in design. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 11(1):105--121, 2002.

[23]

A. Fox and D. Patterson. Crossing the software education chasm. Communications of ACM, 55(5):44--49, May 2012.

Digital Library

[24]

E. Gamma, R. Helm, R. Johnson, and J. Vlissides. Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Addison-Wesley, 1994.

Digital Library

[25]

A. Hunt and D. Thomas. The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master. Addison-Wesley, 1999.

Digital Library

[26]

K. Juuti and J. Lavonen. Design-based research in science education: One step towards methodology. NorDiNa, 4:54--68, 2006.

[27]

J. Keith. DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model. friends of ED, 2005.

Digital Library

[28]

J. Kurhila and A. Vihavainen. Management, structures and tools to scale up personal advising in large programming courses. In Proceedings of the SIGITE '11. ACM, 2011.

Digital Library

[29]

M. Luukkainen, A. Vihavainen, and T. Vikberg. A software craftsman's approach to data structures. In Proceedings of the SIGCSE '12. ACM, 2012.

Digital Library

[30]

R. C. Martin. Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship. Prentice Hall, 2008.

Digital Library

[31]

P. McBreen. Software Craftsmanship: The New Imperative. Prentice Hall, 2001.

[32]

W. Royce. Managing the development of large software systems. In Proceedings of IEEE WESCON 26. TeX Users Group, August 1970.

[33]

A. H. Schoenfeld. Bridging the cultures of educational research and design. Educational Designer, 1(2), 2009.

[34]

K. Schwaber and M. Beedle. Agile Software Development with SCRUM. Prentice Hall, 2002.

Digital Library

[35]

The Design-Based Research Collective. Design-based research: An emerging paradigm for educational inquiry. Educational Researcher, 32(1):5--8, 2003.

[36]

A. Vihavainen, M. Paksula, and M. Luukkainen. Extreme apprenticeship method in teaching programming for beginners. In Proceedings of the SIGCSE '11. ACM, 2011.

Digital Library

[37]

A. Vihavainen, M. Paksula, M. Luukkainen, and J. Kurhila. Extreme apprenticeship method: key practices and upward scalability. In Proceedings of the ITiCSE '11. ACM, 2011.

Digital Library

[38]

C. Walls. Spring in Action. Manning Publ., 2011.

Digital Library

Cited By

Pantoja Yépez WHurtado Alegría JBandi AKiwelekar A(2024)Training software architects suiting software industry needs: A literature reviewEducation and Information Technologies10.1007/s10639-023-12149-x29:9(10931-10994)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10639-023-12149-x
Tenhunen SMännistö TIhantola PKousa JLuukkainen M(2023)Software startup within a university – producing industry-ready graduates2023 IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering Education and Training (ICSE-SEET)10.1109/ICSE-SEET58685.2023.00014(82-94)Online publication date: May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE-SEET58685.2023.00014
Kousa JIhantola PHellas ALuukkainen M(2020)Teaching Container-Based DevOps PracticesWeb Engineering10.1007/978-3-030-50578-3_34(494-502)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50578-3_34
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Three years of design-based research to reform a software engineering curriculum
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing education
      1. Computing education programs
        Computer science education

Recommendations

A Project-Based Curriculum for Computer Science Situated to Serve Underrepresented Populations
SIGCSE 2022: Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education - Volume 1

Building on known best practices, this paper describes a newly implemented project-based curriculum for undergraduate computer science majors. The program, designed to provide all students the known benefits of the project-based approach, is being ...
Curriculum '78: recommendations for the undergraduate program in computer science— a report of the ACM curriculum committee on computer science

Contained in this report are the recommendations for the undergraduate degree program in Computer Science of the Curriculum Committee on Computer Science (C³S) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

The core curriculum common to all computer ...
The inteaction between high school curriculum and first year college courses: the case of computing
SIGCSE '10: Proceedings of the 41st ACM technical symposium on Computer science education

Many countries, including those in the developing world, have introduced mandatory Information Technology (IT) courses for high school (HS) students. This was motivated by the importance of IT skills for the general population in view of the widespread ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

SIGITE '12: Proceedings of the 13th annual conference on Information technology education

October 2012

266 pages

ISBN:9781450314640

DOI:10.1145/2380552

General Chair:
Randy Connolly
Mount Royal University, Canada
,
Program Chair:
William D. Armitage
University of South Florida, USA

Copyright © 2012 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

SIGITE: ACM Special Interest Group on Information Technology Education

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 11 October 2012

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

SIGITE ' 12

Sponsor:

SIGITE

SIGITE ' 12: ACM Special Interest Group for Information Technology Education Conference

October 11 - 13, 2012

Alberta, Calgary, Canada

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 176 of 429 submissions, 41%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

10
Total Citations
View Citations
315
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)12
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1

Reflects downloads up to 28 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Pantoja Yépez WHurtado Alegría JBandi AKiwelekar A(2024)Training software architects suiting software industry needs: A literature reviewEducation and Information Technologies10.1007/s10639-023-12149-x29:9(10931-10994)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10639-023-12149-x
Tenhunen SMännistö TIhantola PKousa JLuukkainen M(2023)Software startup within a university – producing industry-ready graduates2023 IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering Education and Training (ICSE-SEET)10.1109/ICSE-SEET58685.2023.00014(82-94)Online publication date: May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE-SEET58685.2023.00014
Kousa JIhantola PHellas ALuukkainen M(2020)Teaching Container-Based DevOps PracticesWeb Engineering10.1007/978-3-030-50578-3_34(494-502)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50578-3_34
Presler-Marshall KHorton EHeckman SStolee KChoi BEscalona MHerzig K(2019)Wait wait. No, tell meProceedings of the 14th International Workshop on Automation of Software Test10.1109/AST.2019.000-1(7-13)Online publication date: 27-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/AST.2019.000-1
Oguz DOguz K(2019)Perspectives on the Gap Between the Software Industry and the Software Engineering EducationIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2019.29366607(117527-117543)Online publication date: 2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2936660
Fagerholm FHellas ALuukkainen MKyllonen KYaman SMaenpaa H(2017)Patterns for Designing and Implementing an Environment for Software Start-Up Education2017 43rd Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA)10.1109/SEAA.2017.67(133-140)Online publication date: Aug-2017
https://doi.org/10.1109/SEAA.2017.67
Li ZZhang ZLiu HShu J(2016)Students' Patterns of Engagement and Course Performance in Cloud-Classroom Courses2016 International Symposium on Educational Technology (ISET)10.1109/ISET.2016.13(89-93)Online publication date: Jul-2016
https://doi.org/10.1109/ISET.2016.13
Fagerholm FVihavainen A(2013)Peer assessment in experiential learning Assessing tacit and explicit skills in agile software engineering capstone projects2013 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)10.1109/FIE.2013.6685132(1723-1729)Online publication date: Oct-2013
https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE.2013.6685132
Keijonen HKurhila JVihavainen A(2013)Carry-on effect in extreme apprenticeship2013 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)10.1109/FIE.2013.6685011(1150-1155)Online publication date: Oct-2013
https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE.2013.6685011
Vikberg TVihavainen ALuukkainen MKurhila J(2013)Early Start in Software CoachingAgile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming10.1007/978-3-642-38314-4_2(16-30)Online publication date: 2013
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38314-4_2

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents