Supporting Assessment of Practices in Software Engineering Courses

Abstract

The main goal of the software engineering courses is to prepare students to face typical problems that occur in professional contexts. Thus, students need to be provided with tools and resources to be trained correctly, and therefore, courses need to be reoriented towards software industry demands without neglecting the academic quality. In this context, Scrum, which is widely used for manufacturing software, arises as a suitable teaching strategy to introduce students the main software engineering practices usually performed by the industry. This work proposes a teaching model based on Scrum and reinforced with agile coaching. This novel model has been compared to RUP (Rational Unified Process) and validated using the framework CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) to measure the coverage of practices achieved by our model. The results show that our agile teaching model allows students to achieve higher coverage of software engineering practices, and maximize their learning experience.