New sustainable teaching approaches in software engineering education

摘要

Ten years ago, it was usual that projects in the software industry ran on for years before the customer was able to lay his hands on the product he had ordered. This often resulted in delays, budget overruns and disappointing deliverables. During the last decade, the Agile approach has been taking over software project management, shortening product development cycles from a few years to a few weeks or even days. Recently, the agile approach has even been used for developing a new car which runs 100 miles per gallon [1]. Several recent surveys [2], [3] show that agile methodologies like Scrum, Extreme Programming or Kanban have successfully been adopted by many companies to develop software. However, agile methodologies do not come for free. A different set of skills, or agile practices as they are called, are necessary for the software engineers in order to be able to sucessfully deliver high-quality software at the end of every iteration. The same surveys show that only few of the agile practices are used and even fewer are applied consequently and thoroughly. This is to a great extent due to the lack of skilled software engineers. Although teaching agile software development has drawn some attention in recent research, we do not yet seem to be able to “deliver” the appropriately skilled engineers. What is the reason for this, and more importantly, how can we improve the situation? In this position paper we propose a more holistic approach for teaching agile software engineering, in which the required agile practices and values are not only integrated theoretically but also practically applied and repeated until they become a habit to students and software engineers.