Energizing Software Engineering Education through Real-World Projects as Experimental Studies

The use of a semester-long project to apply theoretical knowledge and provide “handson” experience has long been a staple of software engineering courses. Our experience shows that a typical industrial project can also enhance software engineering research and bring theories to life. The University of Kentucky (UK) is in the initial phase of developing a software engineering curriculum. The first course, a graduate-level survey of Software Engineering, strongly emphasized quality engineering. Assisted by the UK Clinic (part of the UK Medical School), the students undertook a project to develop a phenylalanine milligram tracker. It helps phenylketonuria (PKU) sufferers to monitor their diet as well as assists PKU researchers to collect data. The project was also used as an informal experimental study. The applied project approach to teaching software engineering appears to be successful thus far. The approach taught many important software and quality engineering principles to inexperienced graduate students in an accurately simulated industrial development environment. It resulted in the development of a framework for describing and evaluating such a real-world project, including evaluation of the notion of a user advocate. It also resulted in interesting experimental trends, though based on a very small sample. Specifically, estimation skills seem to improve over time (with as little as one experience) and function point estimation may be more accurate than LOC estimation.