Investigating Student Insight in Software Engineering Team Projects

Simona Motogna, Dan Suciu, Arthur-Jozsef Molnar

2021

Abstract

Preparing software engineering students for industry jobs is a difficult task. Employers often ask for a combination of technical and soft skills. In this paper, we describe an exploratory study focused on 47 teams of 3rd year Computer Science students who were each involved in the development of a medium sized software application. We employed open coding on free-text student feedback and focused on key areas of working process, planning, challenges and lessons learned. We evaluated how student perception aligned with feedback received from mentors with industry experience, as well as with the assessment from teaching staff experienced in software engineering. We open-sourced a replication package that allows reusing, repeating or extending our investigation. We showed that the course objectives were reached, that soft skills remain an important component of team projects as well as identified several action points that can further improve education in software engineering.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Motogna S., Suciu D. and Molnar A. (2021). Investigating Student Insight in Software Engineering Team Projects. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE, ISBN 978-989-758-508-1, pages 362-371. DOI: 10.5220/0010478803620371

in Bibtex Style

@conference{enase21,
author={Simona Motogna and Dan Suciu and Arthur-Jozsef Molnar},
title={Investigating Student Insight in Software Engineering Team Projects},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE,},
year={2021},
pages={362-371},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010478803620371},
isbn={978-989-758-508-1},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE,
TI - Investigating Student Insight in Software Engineering Team Projects
SN - 978-989-758-508-1
AU - Motogna S.
AU - Suciu D.
AU - Molnar A.
PY - 2021
SP - 362
EP - 371
DO - 10.5220/0010478803620371