Software Engineering for Millennials, by Millennials

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.Comment: 8 pages, 9 tables, 4 figures, Second International Workshop on Software Engineering Education for Millennial

Should Software Engineering Projects be the Backbone or the Tail of Computing Curricula?

Most computer science (CS) and software engineering (SE) curricula include some form of SE project with the aim of lowering the gap between CS and SE education and real-world demands in industry. In this paper we briefly discuss and explain our findings of software engineering projects taught at LiU in Sweden. These courses use what we call the ¿tail¿ approach, where student projects are performed at the end of a degree program. We then argue that there are several problems with this approach and sketch an idea where SE projects are an integrated part of a curriculum. Furthermore, pros and cons of this idea, which we call the SE project ¿backbone¿ approach, are discussed and analyzed.QC 20210622</p