ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
Page 14
Software Engineering Education
(SEEd)
Mark A. Ardis
School of Systems and Enterprises
Stevens Institute of Technology
Hoboken, NJ 07030 USA
mark.ardis@stevens.edu
Peter B. Henderson, Emeritus
Department of Computer Science & Software Engineering
Butler University
Indianapolis, Indiana 46208 USA
phenders@butler.edu
DOI: 10.1145/2347696.2347720
http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2347696.2347720
Is Software Engineering Ready for MOOCs?
The latest rage in university education is Massive Open Online
Courses (MOOCs). These courses attract thousands of students
for each offering. Students view lectures online and submit their
quizzes and homework to automated grading systems. How well
does this format fit software engineering? This column looks at
some of the choices made by Armando Fox and David Patterson
at the University of California, Berkeley in the creation of their
course: Software Engineering for Software as a Service (SaaS).
Some of those choices reveal advantages and disadvantages of
adopting the MOOC approach.
Fox and Patterson teach a longer version of their course on
campus at Berkeley, CS 169: Software Engineering. The lectures
from the first five weeks of the campus course were recorded for
use in the online version. Although the online course covers only
about a third of the material in the campus course, it provides a
surprising amount of useful introductory material, and it gives
students a chance to experience many of the key tasks and activities of software engineering.
One of the choices made by Fox and Patterson in designing
their campus course was to give students a quick introduction to
their chosen software development process and tools at the start
of the course. This enables students to start practicing software
development after only a few hours of instruction. For example,
in the second homework assignment students modify a web application and see how their changes result in new functionality for
the user of the app. They use standard tools and methods just like
real software developers.
To be fair, students who take the campus course have already
completed prerequisite programming courses. Online students
without any programming background would probably find the
September 2012 Volume 37 Number 5
homework assignments quite difficult. But students are able to
accomplish quite a bit by writing a relatively small amount of
code. This is the result of another choice of Fox and Patterson:
selecting Ruby and Rails for the development environment.
Ruby and Rails provide most of the infrastructure needed for
creation of web applications and services. They also come with
additional tools that enable effective software development practices. Students in the SaaS course practice behavior-driven development with Cucumber and RSpec. By describing tests in terms
that are easily understood by customers, students learn to appreciate some of the difficulties that stakeholders have in describing
their goals and intentions. They also learn to appreciate the value
of testing early and often.
Fox and Patterson made a good case for their approach in a recent CACM article [1]. Their survey of Berkeley alumni convinced them that they should include several modern software
development techniques, including: version control, working in a
team, software-as-a-service, design patterns, unit testing skills,
Ruby on Rails, cloud computing, test-first development, user stories, low-fidelity user interface mockups, and measurement of
progress in terms of velocity. All of these topics and techniques
are included in their campus course, and many of them are also in
the online version.
Most of these techniques translate well to MOOCs, especially
those involving individual programming tasks. Programming assignments can be assessed using automated systems fairly easily.
Teamwork, however, is an unknown. There is nothing in principle
that prevents students from working effectively in geographically
distributed teams, but to my knowledge no one has tried it in the
MOOC format yet.
Not all software engineering is about software-as-a-service.
Some software systems are created as embedded systems, some
are shrink-wrapped products, some are the "glue" that hold other
components together, to name just a few alternatives. And not all
skills needed by software engineering are exercised by developing web applications. Requirements elicitation, review techniques, and effective presentation skills are also important.
It is these more social skills that may be the most difficult to
practice and assess in the MOOC format. Again, there is nothing
in principle that prevents students from participating in any of
these activities at a distance, but lack of co-location certainly
make them more difficult. Also, it is hard to see how robotic
grading can be applied to these exercises. Programs can be tested
to see if they produce the correct results, but elicitation activities
and reviews have no oracle. Perhaps this is an active research
project somewhere.
An interesting development in MOOCs that might help develop the more social side of software engineering is the spontaneous creation of study groups and self-appointed teaching
assistants. Both of these have been very effective in the MOOC
by Fox and Patterson. We look forward to seeing how other software engineering courses adapt to the MOOC format.
References
1. Armando Fox and David Patterson, Crossing the Software Education
Chasm: An Agile approach that exploits cloud computing, CACM 5(5),
44-49, May 2012.