Software engineering problems encountered by capstone project teams
- Autores: Jari Vanhanen, O. A. Lehtinen
- Localización: The International journal of engineering education, ISSN-e 0949-149X, Vol. 30, no. 6 (Parte A), 2014, págs. 1461-1475
- Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
Capstone projects are a common part of engineering education. In a capstone project, learning takes place mainly through solvingproblems during the project. Therefore, understanding what problems the capstone project teams encounter increasesunderstanding on what the students can learn. We collected problems encountered by eleven capstone project teams in a softwaredevelopment project course at Aalto University. Each team used a root cause analysis method twice during their project to identifythe problems and their cause-and-effect relationships. The number of identified problems was 103–247 per team. We analysed theproblems qualitatively and summarized them under the following four main topics: system functionality, system quality,communication and taking responsibility. The problems created opportunities for learning about software engineering. However, insome teams the problems worsened so much that they created educationally detrimental situations. For example, learning a newprogramming language from scratch is valuable for a student, but it may start taking too much attention from many othereducational aspects of the project. We give suggestions for mitigating the educationally detrimental situations in capstone projects.The suggestions include an iterative development process, team formation practicalities, reasonable project topics, customereducation, instructions on selecting and adopting crucial tools, emphasizing learning, and adding control to ensure the use of thedesired working practices. Our results help the teachers of similar courses in evaluating the potential that their courses have onreaching specific educational goals and in improving their courses by decreasing educationally detrimental situations.
