Simulating Critical Software Engineering

One goal of many introductory software engineering courses is to simulate realistic software engineering. Unfortunately, many of the practical constraints of typical courses are antithetical to that goal: instead of working in large teams on large projects, dealing with changing requirements and maintaining programs over many years, courses generally involve students working alone or in small teams with short projects than end the first time the program works correctly on some selected input. Of course, it is impossible (and undesirable) to carry out full industrial software development within the context of a typical university course. However, it is possible to simulate some aspects of safety critical software engineering in an introductory software engineering course. This paper describes an approach to teaching introductory software engineering that focuses on using lightweight analysis tools to aid in producing secure, robust and maintainable programs. We describe how assignments were designed that integrate analysis tools with typical software engineering material and reports on results from an experiment measuring students understanding of program invariants.