Fostering Software Engineering Competence through Valid, Reliable, and Practical Assessments of Individual Contributions to Team Projects

Washington State University, Pullman WA

Investigators

Abstract

This IUSE Computer Science Level 2 Engaged Student Learning project aims to serve the national interest by preparing software engineering students to make high-quality contributions to team software projects. The goal of this project is to develop and evaluate a pedagogical approach for undergraduate software engineering courses that include team software development projects. In these courses a significant problem is assessing the contributions that a student makes to their team. This problem will be addressed by deriving the desirable qualities of four key software engineering artifacts that team members contribute to a software project. Based on these qualities, students will learn how to contribute high-quality artifacts by assessing and reflecting on their and their peers’ artifact contributions. This project will strengthen software engineering education by developing rigorous methods for assessing the quality of software project contributions. This project will iteratively refine and empirically evaluate a valid, reliable, practical, and just approach to assessing the software engineering artifacts that individual software engineers contribute to team software development projects. By taking a rigorous empirical approach to deriving the desirable properties of individuals’ contributions, developing a valid and reliable method for assessing individuals’ contributions against those properties, and making assessments practical through a software tool that enables assessments to be easily performed on samples of individuals’ contributions, this project will (a) contribute a novel pedagogy for fostering software engineering competence through peer review and reflection; (b) improve instructors’ ability to assess their students’ learning, and (c) enhance researchers’ ability to study and evaluate pedagogies for team projects in software engineering education. The NSF IUSE:EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.