TITLE:
Raising Awareness of the Constituents of Software Design – The Case of Documentation
AUTHORS:
Lavy Ilana, Yadin Aharon
KEYWORDS:
Team-Based Role Play, Software Engineering, Peer Review, Maintainability
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Software Engineering and Applications,
Vol.3 No.5,
May
24,
2010
ABSTRACT: This research was performed within a software engineering workshop for Computer Science students. For addressing the soft skills issues required by the industry, the course was delivered as a workshop with various (inter and intra) team based activities. An additional objective of outlining the importance of software maintainability issues was achieved through team-based role play. There were three assignments in which each team had to continue the work performed by another team, thus creating a dependency between the teams as might happen during maintenance. The main research study objective was to examine the effect of employing this kind of a team-based role-play peer-review on the students’ learning process regarding maintainability. Data referring to the students’ perceptions is presented and analyzed in addition to student reflections on the workshop which demonstrate their expanded understanding of the design and application process.