An Analysis of Students’ Perception towards User Involvement in a Software Engineering Undergraduate Curriculum

Rafael Chanin, Jorge Melegati, Mariana Detoni, Xiaofeng Wang, Rafael Prikladnicki, Afonso Sales

2020

Abstract

Developing soft skills as well as other non-technical issues is essential for a successful career in software engineering. Educators, practitioners and researchers are paying more attention to this matter as they understand its importance to a software development context. Even the IEEE/ACM software engineering guidelines has already pointed out the importance of working with real-world projects in order to develop such skills. Being technically competent is not enough; students should have opportunities to go beyond coding and experience interactions with real users in order to better prepare themselves for their future. In this sense, this paper presents a software engineering undergraduate program that connects students with real projects throughout its curriculum. In order to evaluate whether this program helps students into understanding the importance of connecting and interacting with real stakeholders, we performed a survey with 111 students from this program. Our results indicate that providing a structure throughout the program in which students actually work on real projects is beneficial for their soft skills development.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Chanin R., Melegati J., Detoni M., Wang X., Prikladnicki R. and Sales A. (2020). An Analysis of Students’ Perception towards User Involvement in a Software Engineering Undergraduate Curriculum.In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU, ISBN 978-989-758-417-6, pages 325-332. DOI: 10.5220/0009188903250332

in Bibtex Style

@conference{csedu20,
author={Rafael Chanin and Jorge Melegati and Mariana Detoni and Xiaofeng Wang and Rafael Prikladnicki and Afonso Sales},
title={An Analysis of Students’ Perception towards User Involvement in a Software Engineering Undergraduate Curriculum},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU,},
year={2020},
pages={325-332},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0009188903250332},
isbn={978-989-758-417-6},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU,
TI - An Analysis of Students’ Perception towards User Involvement in a Software Engineering Undergraduate Curriculum
SN - 978-989-758-417-6
AU - Chanin R.
AU - Melegati J.
AU - Detoni M.
AU - Wang X.
AU - Prikladnicki R.
AU - Sales A.
PY - 2020
SP - 325
EP - 332
DO - 10.5220/0009188903250332