Software Projects in an Academic Environment

Expert-based effort prediction in software projects can be taught, beginning with the practices learned in an academic environment in courses designed to encourage them. However, the length of such courses is a major concern for both industry and academia. Industry has to work without its employees while they are taking such a course, and academic institutions find it hard to fit the course into an already tight schedule. In this research, the set of Personal Software Process (PSP) practices is reordered and the practices are distributed among fewer assignments, in an attempt to address these concerns. This study involved 148 practitioners taking graduate courses who developed 1,036 software course assignments. The hypothesis on which it is based is the following: When the activities in the original PSP set are reordered into fewer assignments, the result is expert-based effort prediction that is statistically significantly better.

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Software Projects in an Academic Environment

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering ◽

10.1109/tse.1987.232867 ◽

1987 ◽

Vol SE-13 (11) ◽

pp. 1176-1181 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

D.B. Wortman

Keyword(s):

Academic Environment ◽

Software Projects

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Applying Test-driven Development in Evaluating Student Projects

6th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd'20) ◽

10.4995/head20.2020.11218 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Cuong Huy Tran ◽

Dragos Truscan ◽

Tanwir Ahmad

Keyword(s):

Academic Environment ◽

Software Projects ◽

Test Driven Development ◽

Learning And Teaching ◽

Development Methodology ◽

Viable Solution ◽

Teaching Efficiency ◽

Supporting Tool ◽

Student Projects ◽

Technology Area

Grading software projects submitted by students can become a heavy and time-consuming task, which for many students, can result in delayed feedback provided to them. Additionally, one would like to allow students to evaluate themselves early their projects before submitting the final version for grading. This paper presents a solution that improves the grading process of student projects not only for lecturers, but also for students. In our approach, we adopt a test-driven development methodology to provide a clear benchmark of the course project implementation. Our approach allows students to self-evaluate their progress at any moment, while lecturers can use it to automate the grading process. GitHub Classroom is used as a supporting tool to allow students to retrieve and implement their projects from the same initial skeleton project including the tests, and lecturers to retrieve the student projects and evaluate them automatically. The results show that test-driven development is a viable solution to be applied in an academic environment to improve the grading process. This study also shows that courses in Information Technology area could use our approach to increase learning and teaching efficiency.

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