Using continuous integration of code and content to teach software engineering with limited resources

  • Authors:

  • Jörn Guy Süβ;William Billingsley

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Queensland, Australia;University of Queensland, Australia

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Previous courses addressing the gap between student and professional programming practice have either isolated small groups' development in such a way that larger scale difficulties that motivate many professional practices do not arise, or have required significant additional staffing that would be expensive to provide in a large cohort core undergraduate software engineering course. We describe the first iteration of a course that enabled 73 students to work together to improve a large common legacy code base using professional practices and tools, staffed only by two lecturers and two undergraduate students employed as part-time tutors. The course relies on continuous integration and automated metrics, that coalesce frequently updated information in a manner that is visible to students and can be monitored by a small number of staff. The course is supported by a just-in-time teaching programme of thirty-two technical topics. We describe the constraints that determined the design of the course, and quantitative and qualitative data from the first iteration of the course.