Raising Awareness of the Constituents of Software Design – The Case of Documentation

Lavy Ilana, Yadin Aharon

Management Information Systems, Emek Yezreel Academic College, Emek Yezreel, Israel..

DOI: 10.4236/jsea.2010.35056                

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.

Keywords

Team-Based Role Play, Software Engineering, Peer Review, Maintainability

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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