Software Engineering for Millennials, by Millennials

TL;DR

This paper shares the experience of redesigning a university software engineering course to better balance theory and practice, improve teamwork, and foster autonomous learning among students.

Contribution

It presents a novel course redesign approach that balances technical and professional skills within a limited workload, based on iterative teaching experiences.

Findings

Improved student teamwork and engagement.

Enhanced autonomous learning of new technologies.

Insights from iterative course implementations.

Abstract

Software engineers need to manage both technical and professional skills in order to be successful. Our university offers a 5.5 year program that mixes computer science, software and computer engineering, where the first two years are mostly math and physics courses. As such, our students' first real teamwork experience is during the introductory SE course, where they modify open source projects in groups of 6-8. However, students have problems working in such large teams, and feel that the course material and project are "disconnected". We decided to redesign this course in 2017, trying to achieve a balance between theory and practice, and technical and professional skills, with a maximum course workload of 150 hrs per semester. We share our experience in this paper, discussing the strategies we used to improve teamwork and help students learn new technologies in a more autonomous manner. We also discuss what we learned from the two times we taught the new course.