The Essence Theory of Software Engineering - Large-Scale Classroom Experiences from 450+ Software Engineering BSc Students

TL;DR

This study evaluates the effectiveness of the Essence Theory of Software Engineering in a large educational setting, involving over 450 students, to bridge the gap between industry practices and academic teaching.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into how Essence can be integrated into software engineering education and identifies barriers to its adoption among students.

Findings

Essence helped students understand high-level software engineering concepts.

Students faced challenges in adopting Essence due to complexity and lack of familiarity.

The study offers recommendations for integrating Essence into curricula.

Abstract

Software Engineering as an industry is highly diverse in terms of development methods and practices. Practitioners employ a myriad of methods and tend to further tailor them by e.g. omitting some practices or rules. This diversity in development methods poses a challenge for software engineering education, creating a gap between education and industry. General theories such as the Essence Theory of Software Engineering can help bridge this gap by presenting software engineering students with higher-level frameworks upon which to build an understanding of software engineering methods and practical project work. In this paper, we study Essence in an educational setting to evaluate its usefulness for software engineering students while also investigating barriers to its adoption in this context. To this end, we observe 102 student teams utilize Essence in practical software engineering projects during a semester long, project-based course.