Alexandre Vasconcelos

Context: Competent practitioners are the most critical factor in accomplishing Software Engineering’s (SE) purpose of building and sustaining high-quality software. Challenges: The demand for competent SE professionals grows faster than academia and industry’s capacity to teach and develop these professionals. There is a discrepancy between the competencies obtained by SE graduates and those required by different domains of the software industry. Conflicts and misuse of SE competency elements and concepts hinder cooperation in the SE community. The simplistic view of human factors related to SE competency hampers its application in SE education, research, and industry communities. Implications: A profound and consensual understanding of SE competency can accelerate SE professionals’ training and direct them to meet the software industry’s needs. Theories and practices based on a uniform construct can improve software quality and increase teams’ productivity.

The software industry is not satisfied with the preparation level of newly graduated professionals in Computing undergraduate courses. There is a predominance of traditional approaches to the Software Engineering (SE) teaching which proved to be inefficient, because they focus on the content from the professor's viewpoint. This research aims to investigate if the use of student-focused approaches in the SE teaching can develop more technical competencies to apply in industry than when traditional approaches are applied. For this, an iterative model has been defined to integrate the main student-focused approaches and a controlled experiment was carried out in four undergraduate courses. The data were collected from structured interviews with students and analyzed using ANOVA. The results showed no significant statistical difference between student-focused and traditional teaching approaches in the development of SE competencies. However, these results were impacted by the motivation and commitment of the experiment students.

The software industry presents dissatisfaction in relation to the level of recently graduated professionals. Consequently, software companies end up investing in the training of these professionals in order to develop skills related to the software development process. This paper presents an experience report of an adaptation of industry training practices in a course of Software Engineering (SE). Initially, we mapped SE topics of the ACM/IEEE curriculum guidelines to the specific practices of the CMMI-DEV model. Then, we carried out a survey of training strategies with 10 consultants in Software Process Improvement (SPI), who also act as SE professors. Finally, these strategies have been adapted and incorporated in a SE Course. We compared the impact of these learning strategies in relation to traditional teaching approaches, regarding the student perception of learning. We observed an increase of approximately 20 percent in student perception of learning in relation to the SE topics with industry training strategies.