Teaching software process modeling

• Authors: Marco Kuhrmann;Daniel Méndez Fernández;Jürgen Münch
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering
• Year: 2013

Most university curricula consider software pro- cesses to be on the fringes of software engineering (SE). Students are told there exists a plethora of software processes ranging from RUP over V-shaped processes to agile methods. Furthermore, the usual students programming tasks are of a size that either one student or a small group of students can manage the work. Comprehensive processes being essential for large companies in terms of reflecting the organization struc- ture, coordinating teams, or interfaces to business processes such as contracting or sales, are complex and hard to teach in a lecture, and, therefore, often out of scope. We experienced tutorials on using Java or C#, or on developing applications for the iPhone to gather more attention by students, simply speaking, as these are more fun for them. So, why should students spend their time in software processes? From our experiences and the discussions with a variety of industrial partners, we learned that students often face trouble when taking their first real jobs, even if the company is organized in a lean or agile shape. Therefore, we propose to include software processes more explicitly into the SE curricula. We designed and implemented a course at Masters level in which students learn why software processes are necessary, and how they can be analyzed, designed, implemented, and continuously improved. In this paper, we present our courses structure, its goals, and corresponding teaching methods. We evaluate the course and further discuss our experiences so that lecturers and researchers can directly use our lessons learned in their own curricula.