Do students recognize ambiguity in software design? a multi-national, multi-institutional report

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Do students recognize ambiguity in software design? a multi-national, multi-institutional report

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International Conference on Software Engineering archive
Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Software engineering table of contents

St. Louis, MO, USA

SESSION: Education & training track table of contents

Pages: 615 - 616

Year of Publication: 2005

ISBN:1-59593-963-2

Authors

Ken Blaha	Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA
Alvaro Monge	California State University, Long Beach
Dean Sanders	Northwest Missouri State University, Maryville, MO
Beth Simon	University of San Diego
Tammy VanDeGrift	University of Washington

Sponsors

ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

Bibliometrics

Downloads (6 Weeks): 9, Downloads (12 Months): 32, Citation Count: 3

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ABSTRACT

Successful software engineering requires experience and acknowledgment of complexity, including that which leads designers to recognize ambiguity within the software design description itself. We report on a study of 21 post-secondary institutions from the USA, UK, Sweden, and New Zealand. First competency and graduating students as well as educators were asked to perform a software design task. We found that as students go from first competency to graduating seniors they tend to recognize ambiguities in under-specified problems. Additionally, participants who recognized ambiguity addressed more requirements of the design.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

	1	http://depts.washington.edu/srcse/.
	2	Barry W. Boehm, Software Engineering Economics, Prentice Hall PTR, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1981
	3	K. M. Bursic and C. J. Atman. Information Gathering: A Critical Step for Quality in the Design Process. Quality Management Journal, 4(4):60--75, 1997.
	4	S. Fincher, M. Petre, J. Tenenberg, K. Blaha, D. Bouvier, et al. Cause for alarm?: A multi-national, multi-institutional study of student-generated software designs. Technical Report 16-04, Computing Laboratory, University of Kent, Canterbury, September 2004. http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/pubs/2004/1953.
	5	Michael McCracken , Vicki Almstrum , Danny Diaz , Mark Guzdial , Dianne Hagan , Yifat Ben-David Kolikant , Cary Laxer , Lynda Thomas , Ian Utting , Tadeusz Wilusz, A multi-national, multi-institutional study of assessment of programming skills of first-year CS students, ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, v.33 n.4, December 2001 [doi>10.1145/572139.572181]

CITED BY 3

	Tzu-Yi Chen , Alvaro Monge , Beth Simon, Relationship of early programming language to novice generated design, ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, v.38 n.1, March 2006
	Anna Eckerdal , Robert McCartney , Jan Erik Moström , Mark Ratcliffe , Carol Zander, Can graduating students design software systems?, ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, v.38 n.1, March 2006
	Daniela Damian , Allyson Hadwin , Ban Al-Ani, Instructional design and assessment strategies for teaching global software development: a framework, Proceeding of the 28th international conference on Software engineering, May 20-28, 2006, Shanghai, China