Software Engineering Process and Its Improvement in the Academy

Changes in software technology and models for software development require commensurate change in the education of software developers. One way of teaching software engineering is to organize a course around a project similar to a real industrial project. The educational community itself is increasingly moving from lecture-format courses to team projects, problem-solving, direct involvement with actual development, and other formats that require students to exercise the ideas they are learning. In this paper we investigate the software engineering process improvement at Kaunas University of Technology to let students experience the realistic software engineering problems and environments during their software engineering education. Organizing the software engineering process we implemented some key practices of repeatable level of Capability Maturity Model. 1. Indroduction Apart of the needed technical preparation, the SE market requires graduated people to be dynamic, collaborative, and professionally independent. Companies in the field often observe that graduated employees need first a training period to learn how to put into work their professional skills in real projects. Software Engineering (SE) is not simply concerned with technical activities, but it also involves both managerial aspects, e.g., definition, organization and planning of multiple interrelated activities, and collaborative aspects, e.g., information exchange and coordination of people working to fulfil a common objective. SE undergoes continuous evolution, because it is a relatively young discipline and because it strongly depends on evolution in both current technology and methods. For these reasons, SE study programs do not adhere to any common structure, but they rather try to answer requirements of the local market’s reality. Hence, both theoretical and practical aspects tackled by the programs are diverse. Many educators choose projects as the educational tool to meet SE requirements of both industrial and academic sides. For instance, the SE course at Politecnico di Torino [3] is based on a project carried out in collaboration with an industrial organization playing the role of the customer, and a general process model formalized in a quality manual given to the students. The overall objective of this paper is investigating of the SE process improvement at Kaunas University of Technology (KUT) to let students experience the realistic software engineering problems and environments during their SE education. Changes in software technology and models for software development require commensurate change in the education of software developers. First, the educational institutions themselves must be able to adapt quickly, both in the content of their offerings and in their ability to exploit new technology in support of education. Second, the educational institutions must prepare their graduates to assume responsibility for upgrading their own skills throughout their careers [1]. Students are in general skilled in programming and up-to-date in current technology innovations, but have a poor SE background. I.e., they have no experience in applying known SE concepts and methods to practical development problems. Also, they are not used to teamwork, i.e., students often work individually and dislike collaboration, and mutual responsibilities and they are not used to communicate and present fruitfully their work, or to discuss with people with a different background [2]. 1 This work was supported by Lithuanian State Science and Studies Foundation, award B-06/2003