Training Software Engineers using Open-Source Software: The Students' PerspectiveSEET
Software Engineering courses often emphasize teaching methodologies and concepts in small and controlled environments over teaching, say, maintenance aspects of full-fledged real software systems. This decision is partly justified due to the difficulty of bringing to the context of a classroom a real software project. The widespread presence of open source projects, however, is contributing to alleviating this problem. Several instructors have already adopted contributions to open source projects as part of their evaluation process, and these instructors reported many benefits, including the improvement on students’ technical and social skills. However, little is known about the students’ perceptions regarding the need to contribute to an open source project as part of a Software Engineering course. To better understand the students’ challenges, benefits, and attitudes, we conducted 21 semi-structured interviews with students who took these courses in five different Brazilian universities. We also enriched this data with an analysis of commits performed in the repositories that students contributed to. We observed that even though some instructors chose the open source projects to students to work themselves, some students and even the open source community participated in the process of choosing projects and tasks. Students’ contributions varied concerning both complexity (measured by the number of additions, deletions, and edited files) and diversity (measured regarding the different programming languages used). Among the benefits, students reported improving their technical skills and their self-confidence. Finally, some students found extremely important for instructors’ being involved with open source initiatives (extra-classroom).
Fri 31 MayDisplayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change
11:00 - 12:30 | Empirical Studies of SE EducationPosters / Software Engineering Education and Training at St-Paul / Ste-Catherine Chair(s): Sira Vegas Universidad Politecnica de Madrid | ||
11:00 15mTalk | Training Software Engineers using Open-Source Software: The Students' PerspectiveSEET Software Engineering Education and Training Gustavo Pinto UFPA, Clarice Moraes Ferreira Universidade Federal do Pará, Cleice Souza Instituto Federal do Pará, Igor Steinmacher Northern Arizona University, Paulo Meirelles Federal University of São Paulo Pre-print | ||
11:15 6mPoster | An Empirical Study on Female Participation in Software Project Courses Posters Anh Nguyen Duc University College of Southeast Norway, Letizia Jaccheri Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Pekka Abrahamsson University of Jyväskylä | ||
11:21 15mTalk | Attitudes, Beliefs, and Development Data Concerning Agile Software Development PracticesSEET Software Engineering Education and Training Christoph Matthies Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Johannes Huegle Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Tobias Dürschmid Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Ralf Teusner Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam Pre-print | ||
11:36 6mPoster | Comparing the Popularity of Testing Careers among Canadian, Chinese, and Indian Students Posters | ||
11:42 10mTalk | A Survey on Online Learning Preferences for Computer Science and ProgrammingSEET Software Engineering Education and Training Javier Escobar-Avila Florida State University, Deborah Venuti Florida State University, Massimiliano Di Penta University of Sannio, Sonia Haiduc Florida State University | ||
11:52 6mPoster | Software engineering studies attractiveness for the highly educated women planning to change career in Finland Posters | ||
11:58 32mTalk | Author Panel DiscussionSEET Software Engineering Education and Training |