Teaching More Comprehensive Model-Based Software Engineering

This paper is an experience report and discussion of an experiment in teaching and using a comprehensive model-based methodology and tool (Objectory) in a large software project. The paper describes in detail the preparation of such an experiment, states our assumptions during the planning phase, and presents the results together with a discussion of the most important issues. We observed certain improvements in the productivity and understanding of the students, while discovering a number of non-trivial organizational and pedagogical issues still remaining to be solved (e.g. communication latency and breakdown; project set up time; training time etc.). We believe that this paper will provide valuable insights to the reader at a number of different levels: 1. To those interested in state of the art software engineering methodologies; 2. To those interested in Objectory per se; 3. To those interested in the issues of introducing a sophisticated modeling methodology into a pilot project involving a large number of participants.1