Tools and Resources for Educating Software Engineering Students with a Quality Perspective

Abstract

Software Engineering (SE) courses play a pivotal role towards achieving the intended learning outcomes (ILOs) for Computer Science graduates. In recent years, most SE courses are also offered to students from self-financing programmes and other disciplines. Classes grow in size and consist of students from diverse backgrounds. Time and resources limitations and the high student-to-instructor ratios have severely constrained the scope of experiences that students may gain and the supervision they receive. It is increasingly challenging to manage the teaching, learning and assessment activities to achieve the ILOs for SE courses, particularly for those that emphasize quality aspects in software development. This project proposes to develop software tools and teaching and learning materials for SE courses as a step towards better support for alignment of learning and assessment activities with the corresponding programme and course ILOs. These tools and resources are expected to be used in different ways for different SE courses that embrace a quality-centric notion of software development, in order to support innovative teaching and learning activities to suit students of diverse backgrounds.