Open Source Software: A Source of Possibilities for Software Engineering Education and Empirical Software Engineering

AbstractStudents’ experience is used in empirical software engineering research as well as in software engineering education to group students in either homogeneous or heterogeneous groups. To do so, students are commonly asked to self-rate their experience, as self-rated experience has been shown to be a good predictor for performance in programming tasks. Another experience-related measurement is participants’ confidence (i.e., how confident is the person that their given answer is correct). Hence, self-rated experience and confidence are used as selector or control variables throughout empirical software engineering research and software engineering education. In this paper, we analyze data from several student experiments conducted in the past years to investigate whether self-rated experience and confidence are also good predictors for students’ performance in model comprehension tasks. Our results show that while students can somewhat assess the correctness of a particular answer to one concrete question regarding a conceptual model (i.e., their confidence), their overall self-rated experience does not correlate with their actual performance. Hence, the use of the commonly used measurement of self-rated experience as a selector or control variable must be considered unreliable for model comprehension tasks.

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A Perspective on Software Engineering Education with Open Source Software

Handbook of Research on Open Source Software ◽

10.4018/978-1-59140-999-1.ch054 ◽

2011 ◽

pp. 690-702 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Pankaj Kamthan

Keyword(s):

Software Engineering ◽

Open Source ◽

Open Source Software ◽

Process Model ◽

Source Code ◽

Management Process ◽

Software Engineering Education ◽

Computer Aided ◽

Computer Aided Software Engineering

As the development and use of open source software (OSS) becomes prominent, the issue of its outreach in an educational context arises. The practices fundamental to software engineering, including those related to management, process, and workflow deliverables, are examined in light of OSS. Based on a pragmatic framework, the prospects of integrating OSS in a traditional software engineering curriculum are outlined, and concerns in realizing them are given. In doing so, the cases of the adoption of an OSS process model, the use of OSS as a computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tool, OSS as a standalone subsystem, and open source code reuse are considered. The role of openly accessible content in general is discussed briefly.

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A Perspective on Software Engineering Education with Open Source Software

International Journal of Open Source Software and Processes ◽

10.4018/ijossp.2012070102 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 4 (3) ◽

pp. 13-25

Author(s):

Pankaj Kamthan

Keyword(s):

Software Engineering ◽

Open Source ◽

Open Source Software ◽

Process Model ◽

Source Code ◽

Educational Context ◽

Engineering Curriculum ◽

Software Engineering Education ◽

Computer Aided Software Engineering

As the development and use of open source software (OSS) becomes prominent, the issue of its outreach in an educational context arises. The practices fundamental to software engineering, including those related to management, process, and workflow deliverables, are examined in light of OSS. Based on a pragmatic framework, the prospects of integrating OSS in a traditional software engineering curriculum are outlined, and concerns in realizing them are given. In doing so, the cases of the adoption of an OSS process model, the use of OSS as a computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tool, OSS as a standalone subsystem, and open source code reuse are considered. The role of openly accessible content in general is discussed briefly.

Download Full-text