Integrating Human-Centric Approaches into Undergraduate Software Engineering Education: A Scoping Review and Curriculum Analysis in the Australian Context

TL;DR

This paper reviews existing literature and analyzes the Australian software engineering curriculum to identify how human-centric approaches can be integrated into undergraduate education, aiming to improve software project success by focusing on human needs.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive scoping review of HCSE topics and curriculum approaches, and offers a curriculum analysis specific to the Australian context to enhance human-centric software engineering education.

Findings

Five common themes for HCSE topics identified from literature.

Australian curriculum analysis reveals gaps in human-centric topics.

Proposed curriculum scaffolding aligns HCSE with software engineering processes.

Abstract

Human-Centric Software Engineering (HCSE) refers to the software engineering (SE) processes that put human needs and requirements as core practice throughout the software development life cycle. A large majority of software projects fail to cater to human needs and consequently run into budget, delivery, and usability issues. To support human-centric software engineering practices, it is important for universities to train their students on how to consider human needs. But what topics from HCSE should be provided in the undergraduate curriculum? Curriculum guidelines for software engineering are available, however do not represent update to date considerations for human-factors. To address this issue, this paper presents a scoping review to identify the topics and curriculum approaches suitable for teaching HCSE to undergraduate software engineering students. The scoping review was conducted according to the protocol by PRISMA-ScR (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews). Through PRISMA-ScR, a total of 36 conference or journal papers were identified as viable for analysis,with 5 common themes found that describe topics and curriculum approaches relevant for teaching software engineering. Using the outcomes of the scoping review, this paper also analyses the Australian Software Engineering curriculum to understand the extent at which human centred software engineering topics are scaffolded into course structures. This paper concludes by suggesting topic scaffolding for the undergraduate curriculum that aligns with the software engineering process. Overall, by providing a focus on HCSE topics and curriculum approaches, the education of HCSE among current and future software engineers can increase, leading to long-term impact on the success of software projects for all stakeholders.